Conflict Graffiti: From Revolution to Gentrification 9780226815671

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Con fli c t Graffit i

Conflict Graffiti From Revolution to Gentrification

John Lennon The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Neil Harris Endowment Fund, which honors the innovative scholarship of Neil Harris, the Preston and Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. The fund is supported by contributions from the students, colleagues, and friends of Neil Harris. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0 -­226-­81566-­4 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0 -­226-­81569-­5 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0 -­226-­81567-­1 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226815671.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lennon, John, 1975– author. Title: Conflict graffiti : from revolution to gentrification / John Lennon. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021021310 | ISBN 9780226815664 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226815695 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226815671 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Graffiti—Social aspects. | Graffiti—Political aspects. | Art and social conflict. | Political art. Classification: LCC GT3912 .L46 2021 | DDC 751.7/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021310 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS Preface vii an introduction to conflict graffiti 1 1. walls, streets, and public spaces 23 2. the messy politics of conflict graffiti: desire, graffiti, and assembling a revolution 61 3. erasing people and land: banksy, the separation wall, and international graffiti tourists 99 4. framing hurricane katrina: graffiti and the “new ” new orleans 133 5. “ for more than profit ” : graffiti, street art, and the gentrification of detroit 169 conclusion: new waves: early impressions of covid -19 graffiti 209 Acknowledgments 223 Notes 227 Index 267 Plates 1–12 follow page 70; plates 13–20 follow page 182.

Preface

I discovered graffiti through the smell of its removal. One of my first childhood memories of my father is seeing him in his suit and tie with a bottle of turpentine in one hand and a rag in the other. Most mornings before work, my dad would check our fence and lamppost for graffiti, and if anyone had tagged it overnight, he would laboriously rub the names out. My father is a first-­generation Irish American raised by a widowed working-­class mother in the Bronx. Self-­educated, he became an electrical engineer by studying textbooks at night, he bought a house, and he moved his family to Queens. This small corner house was his (mortgaged) American dream. To him, graffiti was a violent and cowardly attack, and so every morning, he protected our house. This vision of my dad is so ingrained in my understanding of graffiti that sometimes when I am walking through a neighborhood and spot a fence covered in tags, I think of him, and I can faintly smell turpentine. As my father erased graffiti from our home, I became fascinated by it. I remember emerging onto subway platforms—first holding my father’s hand, then going by myself—and seeing train car after train car coated with fantastical images. The wildstyle was illegible to me, but I was absorbed by its intricate precision. The graffiti characters were recognizable—Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse were favorites—but often racialized, dressed in a style of clothes I didn’t own and usually holding spray cans. In subsequent years, the styles evolved, Mayor Ed Koch declared (and lost) a war on graffiti, and I kept my eyes on the trains. I grew up and went to college and then graduate school away from New York before moving to Brooklyn as an English professor. In the wake of Rudy Giuliani’s draconian “broken windows” policies, the graffiti had changed, but my fascination with it never lessened. I taught classes on graffiti, conducted graffiti walking tours for my students, and interviewed and hung

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out with graffiti writers. Every morning, I kept my eyes on the walls of my Greenpoint neighborhood to see who was getting up the most. Then Egypt’s 2011 Tahrir Square demonstrations materialized. I followed the battles on the internet, amazed by the bravery of the street protesters. And I saw the graffiti. It was a different type of graffiti from what I knew, a cacophony of Arabic and English writing and drawing on every conceivable space. Large murals created by experienced hands appeared next to angry, shaky lettering. The protests were bodily, violent, and passionate. The graffiti matched this visceral intensity. I joined Twitter and Flickr, followed graffiti writers and activists, and watched the walls in a faraway country fill up with spray paint. I tweeted at some protesters and followed up with email and phone conversations. Staring at these graffiti images, I found myself reciting one question: Why? When police snipers are firing down from rooftops and the blood of friends is spilling onto the streets, why would someone stop and write graffiti? I traveled to Lebanon, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Germany, and Sweden to meet with graffiti writers and activists to find out. As my focus on Egypt expanded, so did my understanding of conflict graffiti. I am grateful for all those who made the time to trust and speak with me (and often introduce me to their writer-­activist friends). Conflict Graffiti is not an ethnographic study, but my ideas could not have evolved without these generous men and women. As I discuss throughout this book, conflict graffiti is inherently about violence (both surviving violence and counteracting it), but the people I met through this project offered me kindness and patient conversation. My initial idea for this project focused exclusively on overt state violence—for example, graffiti responses to Israel’s Separation Wall—but as my ideas progressed, I began exploring violence that is not as recognizable as a border wall but is often as devastating, especially as the conflict evolves. Here, I began thinking of state violence not only as tanks on city streets but also as embedded within the mundane policy decisions affecting the poor and working class. I traveled to New Orleans to explore the city post-­Katrina and to Detroit post-­bankruptcy, interviewing more writers, activists, and real estate developers and entrepreneurs. The streets of these rebuilding cities are filled with beautiful, new large murals and active graffiti scenes—all while houses are being demolished and water and electricity cut off to thousands of people. It is quite clear that racialized capitalism is a violent driving force of this renewal. In connecting my research and travels, various patterns emerged. In each area I analyze, there was an existing graffiti scene (however small) before the conflict that exploded onto the streets. As the conflict raged, graffiti expanded exponentially, taking on numerous forms and created

Preface : ix

by people with little previous graffiti experience. As the conflict subsided, a new graffiti and street-­art scene emerged, one embraced by the state and the business community. Like waves hitting the shore, each graffiti wave mixes with the previous and the following one, with no clear demarcation between them. Anyone on the shoreline, though, still feels the force of each wave. Conflict Graffiti is my attempt to examine the waves from a wide-­angle lens. I first encountered graffiti through its removal and have spent a part of my life following its traces, trying to understand the letters and images present in every city I have visited. In truth, graffiti removal is impossible. Graffiti emerges randomly, its meaning often just out of reach, like the fading memory of a conversation. But just as a memory often reveals subconscious desires, so, too, graffiti reveal a city’s collective unconscious. During moments of conflict, these desires are painstakingly sprayed onto walls, with the varied styles and messages of graffiti matching the numerous yearnings of those willing to risk their lives and freedom. Conflict Graffiti is an attempt to understand the role of graffiti in multiple conflicts, mapping its transformations and discovering what it can tell us about resistance and desire.

Still from the fiftieth episode of Homeland.

AN INTRODUCTION TO CONFLICT GRAFFITI

In an episode from the fifth season of the popular Showtime series Homeland, a Hezbollah commander is escorting Central Intelligence Agency officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) through a Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon. With a khimar covering her head (although her blonde hair is still showing), Mathison stares straight ahead as the commander, grabbing a machine gun from another fighter, walks in front of her through a narrow, debris-­strewn alley. The camera’s lens tightly focuses on the Hezbollah commander and the CIA agent. Arabic graffiti—‫­—لوطن عنصري‬ appears for a split second on the alley’s wall as the two pass by. Almost immediately after the scene from this episode aired in the United States on October 11, 2015, Arabic speakers watching the show understood Homeland had been tricked. Translated into English, the alley’s graffiti reads, “Homeland is racist.”1 Heba Amin, Carmen Kapp, and Don Karl later revealed they were the street artists who had “bombed” the show, describing their “hack” on Amin’s website. The three explained that Homeland’s film crew was searching for “Arabian Street Artists” to “lend authenticity” to the sets of the series that the Washington Post has called “the most bigoted show on television.”2 After being hired, they were provided with images of graffiti in support of Bashar al-­Assad and instructed to spray “nonpolitical” graffiti on the sets’ walls. The Arabic that the show’s crew thought would state sentiments such as “Muhammad is the greatest” was instead a clear political statement decrying the show’s stereotyped descriptions of the Middle East.3 As Homeland’s designers were busy attempting to replicate a Lebanese Hezbollah stronghold, including by re-­creating the minutiae of frayed outdoor plastic curtains on the Berlin-­based set, the artists were writing graffiti in Arabic that, when translated to English, read “There is no Homeland”; “Freedom . . . now in 3-­D!”; “Homeland is Watermelon”; “Homeland

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is a joke and it didn’t make us laugh”; and “#BlackLivesMatter.” Initially, the three artists began their work by spray-­painting Arabic proverbs that could be considered subversive only if read in a particular way. But by the second day on the set, they realized no one was paying attention to what they were writing, and they became emboldened to use Western ignorance of Arab culture and language to argue on the set’s walls against Homeland’s xenophobic representations.4 Much of Homeland’s story line takes place in the Middle East. It is both racist and lazy that no one on the set could apparently read Arabic.5 The show’s racism and xenophobia are inexcusable; the laziness when it comes to graffiti, though, is easily understood. Homeland’s designers were attempting to use graffiti to portray a chaotic conflict zone. In this way, they wanted nothing more than what journalists want when reporting from conflict areas around the world as they stand in front of graffiti-­ sprayed walls: graffiti is a universal symbol of chaos that signifies a dangerous, lawless area.6 What the graffiti actually states or means is often irrelevant. When it is used simply as a visual backdrop, graffiti are easily accessible symbolic representations of disorder for the viewing audience. What Amin, Kapp, and Karl subversively underscored, though, is precisely the opposite: graffiti are not simplistic, visual, monolithic entities. Instead, these painted words and images rudely interject themselves into the world’s contemporary conflicts. From military outposts to urban storefronts, graffiti appear on streets, walls, lampposts, windows, cars, statues, and countless other objects. Sometimes graffiti demand the overthrow of a government in a war-­torn city; other times graffiti are pleas for help in a poverty-­stricken area facing the aftermath of an environmental and political catastrophe. Sometimes the words on the wall are radical, arguing for a progressive political agenda in terms of racial and class liberation; other times, they are pro-­regime accolades advocating the killing of protesters. Sometimes graffiti are disarmingly idealistic; other times they are jokes, occasionally silly, often darkly humorous. In short, graffiti are messy politics. To push graffiti into the background tells only part of the story of an area in conflict. As illustrated by the Homeland example, often that story rests on generic, stock characters and prewritten scripts, representing a conflict in well-­trodden narratives. Bringing graffiti to the forefront, however, better contextualizes a conflict’s evolving nature. Graffiti is part of the architecture of the conflict itself—ephemeral artifacts allowing insight into how protest movements react to their built environments. Each graffito on each wall in each city speaks to a particular conflict. To understand individual utterances is to contextualize the roots of that city’s conflict. But placing these utterances in dialogue with one another and fol-

An Introdu ction to Conflict Graffiti : 3

lowing how these images are distributed and remixed illustrates the ways graffiti’s routes address a conflict’s evolution. For example, on February 11, 2011, a widely shared photograph of Tahrir Square captured the moment when Egypt’s vice president Omar Suleiman announced on television that President Hosni Mubarak had abdicated his office. In the freeze-­frame of the image, fireworks adorn the sky while a mass of bodies—individuals are unrecognizable—react to Mubarak’s ouster, something that many had deemed impossible just a few months prior. Visually, the panoramic photo taken from a distance looks not like a photo at all but like an abstract painting, dripping with random dots that haphazardly seep together within the frame. Each dot, though, is a person who had headed to the square in anger, love, or pain. If we could zoom in on that photo, we would see a kaleidoscope of images and words collectively arguing for Mubarak’s overthrow on the walls that surround Tahrir Square. But just as each protester had individual hopes, desires, and agendas, each sprayed message or image speaks to different individual ideological positionings. Next to the crescent cross was a quickly drawn Guy Fawkes mask. Next to a large replica of Che Guevara in his iconic beret was an earnest sprayed sentence praising the Muslim Brotherhood. Graffiti conversed in both Arabic and English with an abundantly clear consensus: we want Mubarak out of office. There are, though, many textures to the various graffiti that represent an assemblage of differing thoughts on the messiness of sociopolitical movements. Far from a dogmatic message, graffiti offers greater insight into political desire. This focus on graffiti as a complicated and evolving material and immaterial process certainly frames it differently than the Homeland set designers, who wanted no nuance but only a generic script. But this focus also frames graffiti differently than the many scholarly accounts examining conflict zones that do not analyze the process, form, and potential meanings of graffiti. Conflict Graffiti retrieves graffiti from this marginalized position, situating it as an important tool within a larger, amorphous constellation of resistances that materialize protest. Whether from Beirut or Cairo or New Orleans, for many of the graffiti writers, artists, and activists I spoke with, writing on walls is a specific tool to reform the state. Some wish for particular material gains, such as the overthrow of a dictator. Others hope for a revolution of spirit, such as a turning away from capitalism and toward anarchism. All of them, though, understand paint on walls as a way to begin to dismantle oppressive physical and psychological conditions. They are also adamant that graffiti is not a singular tool they can use to achieve their goals. No one I interviewed romantically viewed graffiti as having a magical or innate power to topple a regime, make a police force less racist, or force a nation

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to question its ideological foundations. What graffiti writers and artists articulated to me was that through physical confrontation, both in clogging the streets with their bodies and in painting the walls with their demands, a radical change in society could occur. The materiality of protest is key to their political lives. They need to be on the streets, pressed up against one another, their arms outstretched, voices loud and disruptive. The graffiti on the walls mirror these protesters in the streets. When writing about graffiti in conflict areas, I focus on how these two materialities interact—spray paint on walls and bodies in streets consistently engage in dialogue within the pages of this book. To be clear, though, writing on walls and seizing a city’s square are not the same thing. They have different material presences (and associated dangers) and serve different political functions. They are both, though, types of occupation that frequently share the same public sphere. Scholars employ sophisticated analysis to understand the ideological desires of those who occupy the streets; graffiti, if mentioned at all, is habitually undertheorized. When we think about conflicts, the spectacular violence enacted upon people and cities by overpowering forces is rightfully the focus of discussion. But examining graffiti before, during, and after these spasms of violence renews a needed emphasis on the racialized economic politics that led these people into the path of that violence in the first place, thus furthering discussions on the ways overpowering forces are resisted. When people head to public squares to protest a president, or to the streets in anger over a community member’s death, it is often construed as the spontaneous actions of an undifferentiated mass. This interpretation misrepresents the protest and the protesters. The flames of a demonstration may have been caused by an unplanned spark, but the environmental conditions prepared for the fire’s ignition over an extended period of time. Seemingly spontaneous actions have roots in material conditions. Protesters, shoulder to shoulder, shouting the same slogans and walking together, are uniform in neither their desires nor their actions. Each protester embodies social conditions and inhabits a particular space for reasons that often differ from those of their neighbors. Together they take to the streets as a group, but the differing social and political antagonisms that individual protesters embody are present as well. Graffiti during these moments of conflict are similarly varied, reflecting the intersection of racialized, gendered, and class politics. Study the graffiti and you’ll find an assemblage of competing desires to read and interpret that grant entry into the complicated nature of resistance and its development from before a conflict begins to after it has ended. Similar to the graffiti writers and activists I interviewed, I do not have

An Introdu ction to Conflict Graffiti : 5

an idealized view of graffiti. Obviously, graffiti alone will not bring forth a regime change, and not all sprayed marks are revolutionary. Nor are all graffiti done by protesters. As individuals use graffiti to mark their dissent, those in power, and their supporters, also react with graffiti of their own. Invading armies use graffiti to confuse local fighters, police use spray paint to surreptitiously mark houses, and advertisers co-­ opt graffiti-­style lettering to sell commodities to demonstrators. Protest movements are unstable, fluctuating as a result of internal and external pressures. Graffiti, too, react to unstable environmental conditions. Graffiti are present during revolutionary moments, but graffiti also responds within an environment that is transforming from violent conflict to an uneasy, postconflict state. As cities rebound from political, environmental, and social conflicts, real estate developers are quick to create a buzz around certain neighborhoods by using graffiti to showcase the area as open for business. The conflict changes; so, too, does the graffiti. Graffiti’s afterlife is also unstable. When people come up to a wall, spray can in hand, they are writing in a public space. As the paint dries, others begin to interact with the writing in myriad ways. Authorities often declare “wars” on graffiti, intending to eradicate it with zero-­tolerance policies. In the 1980s, New York City subway writers found their “masterpieces” covering the outside of whole train cars immediately erased by the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Sometimes individuals fight over particular walls or neighborhoods: different writing crews have “battles” in which they write over each other’s tags for bragging rights or dominance, as Susan Phillips discusses in the context of gangs in Wallbangin’ and as Stefano Bloch writes of graffiti crews in his book Going All City.7 Sometimes people take photos of graffiti, remixing them for their own political and financial gain in a way that is quite different from the author’s original intent. For example, after Amin, Kapp, and Stone gained international attention for their hack on the Homeland set, the US-­German artist David Krippendorff sold silkscreen replica images of the graffiti during an art fair. When Amin and others pushed back, Krippendorff argued: “We live in an age of sampling and appropriation . . . I was not ‘stealing’ anybody’s narrative. Homeland is a product of the US entertainment industry, and my homage to a hack at its expense also becomes my narrative.” It is, of course, highly questionable that Krippendorff ’s self-­described “narrative” involves making money off the sale of replicas of political graffiti designed to call attention to racism against Arabs.8 But Krippendorff ’s “homage” is just one more example highlighting the way that graffiti, once placed in the public sphere, is always susceptible to reinterpretation. Spray paint is messy, with paint drips landing in unexpected ways on walls and streets. Graffiti’s afterlife is no less messy.

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For these reasons, I employ an inclusive framework for both terms graffiti and conflict. Politicians, scholars, and practitioners have consistently debated definitions of the term graffiti. Although these definitions have filled countless newspaper op-­eds and pages in scholarly journals, I am not concerned with forming intellectual moats around the term, privileging some wall writing and drawing over others.9 I explore graffiti in terms of place, reception, and distribution. Graffiti is expansive in its application and meanings, and I liberally use the term in this same spirit of capaciousness. I also use the term conflict to capture a wide range of sociopolitical situations detailed in this book. In his many scholarly analyses of global conflicts, John Burton defines conflicts as deep-­rooted problems without discernable solutions involving seemingly recalcitrant, nonnegotiable issues. These are not “disputes” in which parties may find a solution that meet the interests of both sides in a particular crisis. Conflicts, instead, often have roots with many damaged appendages. In response, nongovernmental organizations arise in conflict areas, working to keep people physically safe while striving for an abatement of violence. The academic subfield of peace and conflict studies has attempted, through an interdisciplinary research and pedagogical approach, to examine conflicts holistically and prevent, de-­escalate, and find workable solutions through peaceful means for all parties affected by a conflict.10 My use of the term conflict is influenced by some of the impulses flowing through the many iterations of peace and conflict studies (itself a loose amalgamation of many disciplines and contrary ideological positionings). However, after listening to graffiti writers and activists, I specifically use the term conflict to highlight how violence is intimately involved in the production and reception of graffiti. Many graffiti writers and activists see the use of spray paint as a violent act; it is a tool of resistance used to attack forces that are stronger, more powerful, and equipped with lethal force. In this way, my use of the term is influenced by Marxian conflict theory, which, in simplistic terms, is concerned with how one class solidifies its social and economic power through the exploitation of others. This view of conflict certainly helps frame government responses to protesters in which police are called in (often with military equipment) to quell social uprisings and protect private property. I also use the term conflict to discuss the ways that seemingly “natural” disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina and the damage it caused, emerge from structurally based, racialized class inequalities that formed the conditions for the devastation. To this end, expansively using this term allows for an investigation of other ways that “recovery” is unequal and divided along racial and class demarcations. Specifically, in my chapters on New

An Introdu ction to Conflict Graffiti : 7

Orleans and Detroit, I examine the ways street-­art campaigns are used to “beautify” previously economically underinvested neighborhoods. In this case, the violence of spray paint works against the inhabitants of the neighborhood as a tool to drive up real estate values, bringing in wealthy, often white investors who push out poorer, often Black and Brown inhabitants. The term conflict, therefore, reflects the inherent violence central to all the examples I explore in this book. Graffiti, as I define it, escapes neat categorization. The same is true for the term violence. The chapters here describe a spectrum of violence inhabiting the graffiti and its responses in a particular conflict. For example, the Palestinian who spray-­paints anti–­United States messages on the Separation Wall faces death at the hands of Israeli soldiers. Philippe Bourgois describes this political violence as “directly and purposefully administered in the name of a political ideology, movement or state such as the physical repression of dissent by the army or the police as well as its converse, popular armed struggle against a repressive regime.”11 This stark violence is easily discernable, and throughout this book I discuss graffiti’s role in overt political violence. The chapters, however, also address the structural violence that is present in the economic and racial disparities of neoliberal capitalism, with its unequal international trade policies, exploitation of labor, cutting of social services, and privatization of infrastructure. This violence is not spectacular, as is the damage done by a soldier’s bullet upon the body of a young graffiti writer spraying antiregime messages on a border wall. Rather, this violence comprises the historically ingrained, often legal policies that lay the foundation for socioeconomic oppression of certain classes, races, and ethnicities. Nancy Scheper-­Hughes, in her analysis of violence in the Global South, details how the poor and working class experience this structural violence through the “small wars and invisible genocides” that take place in “peace times,” which radically uncovers the brutalities and their many microforms inflicted by those in power upon the subjugated masses.12 This “everyday violence” takes place far away from the halls of power but emerges in the daily lives of the poor and working class. The discourse surrounding the violence within these communities is muted; when it is discussed, it is often used as evidence of the racial or cultural defects of the marginalized. Far from trivial, this everyday violence can be lethal, and as Pierre Bourdieu showed in his foundational work exploring symbolic violence, it can lead to an internalization of the power structures that keep the poor and working class in their subordinated place, manifesting as an unconscious legitimatization of the (racial, gendered, class) power structures that form a particular society. For Scheper-­Hughes, this violence encountered in the individual body finds parallels in the na-

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tional body.13 Simply put, violence is structural and marginalized bodies intensely feel its effects. In his 1906 book Reflections on Violence, George Sorel wrote that “the problems of violence still remains very obscure.”14 In the more than hundred years since, comprehension of violence—experienced both as a national and as a physical body—is still murky. What is clear, though, is that power is never stable. Even though those in control use physical and symbolic violence to legitimize their place, tides turn, people rebel, and power dynamics change. The oppressed take to the streets to protest with graffiti as one particular tool of many, expressing a counterviolence to those in power.

ferguson, missouri: understanding graffiti waves To introduce the waves of conflict graffiti and how they embody these global moments of violence and counterviolence, I begin with the walls of Ferguson, Missouri, in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death. The graffiti found on these walls is one example of the various and often contradictory graffiti waves that exist within a particular conflict. After a white police officer killed Michael Brown, a young Black man, graffiti played an active role in contextualizing the ensuing protests while framing police violence as both a national and an international problem. As the protests died down, though, graffiti became a tool to depoliticize the uprising, remaking a movement against racialized police violence into universalist and nonconfrontational messages of peace. On August 9, 2014, Officer Darren Wilson stopped Michael Brown, who was walking in the middle of the street in Ferguson, Missouri. In conflicting claims, Brown’s hands either were raised to the sky or were used to lunge at the officer; either way, the unarmed eighteen-­year-­old was shot six times and died in the middle of the day on the same street where he was stopped.15 When news of his suspicious death emerged, the streets of Ferguson erupted in civil unrest. One night after the shooting, a local QuikTrip gas station burned down, twelve stores were vandalized, and numerous people were arrested. A small town twenty miles from St. Louis had suddenly become the focus of international news.16 The unrest lasted for weeks, with the violence livestreamed by protesters and displayed on all the major news channels; the national spotlight shone brightly on this town in Middle America. President Barack Obama made televised pleas for peace and for the protection of Ferguson’s private property as he sympathized with the enraged protesters who saw Brown’s death as an indication of the overall racist practices of a po-

An Introdu ction to Conflict Graffiti : 9

lice state. As Brown’s blood stained the asphalt, thousands of protesters in Ferguson and throughout the country symbolically embodied the young man. Standing sometimes inches from police wearing riot gear, they mirrored Brown’s alleged last position, chanting, “Hands up, don’t shoot!” For many of these protesters, Brown’s death was a bloody representation of the systematic racism that Black and Brown people face daily. For them, Brown’s death was not a singular case of police brutality but representative of the daily violence enacted upon nonwhite communities. Protesters in Ferguson linked Michael Brown’s death with similar deaths of Black men and women in recent years, reenergizing the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Echoing the US civil rights movements of the 1960s—although with a decentralized leadership employing sophisticated uses of social media—these protests were bodily protests, taking over sidewalks, buildings, streets, and highways. The simple plea “Hands up, don’t shoot!” was chanted from coast to coast in solidarity protests by men and women who worried they could be the next victims. This twinning of an outraged physical presence that shut down streets with viral images spreading across social media was highly effective in forcefully expressing resistance to police brutality in the United States. As protesters were overtaking the street, graffiti were also overtaking the walls. In Ferguson, graffiti was a dynamic tool in this resistance, inhabiting both a physical and a virtual life. Reading this graffiti helps reframe the inherent chaos, contextualizing and teasing out nuances of reaction to the unrest. In the days after Michael Brown’s death, graffiti offered a variety of overt political messages. Some were simplistic: Brown’s name written in shaky lines. Others were more ornate: Brown’s image surrounded by “RIP” or “Hands up!” Still others specifically referenced the police in questions, commands, or indictments: “Who will protect the public when police break the law?” “Film the police” and “ACAB” (all cops are bastards). Interestingly, some graffiti referenced the demonstrations even as they were happening: a spray-­painted image of Edward Crawford Jr., a Black man who threw a tear gas canister in the direction of the police while holding a bag of chips, was sprayed on a wall almost immediately after the photo of him doing so went viral.17 As the above examples indicate, graffiti are not monolithic statements. Just as protesters uttered a wide array of political expressions, so did the graffiti. Spraying blanket statements about the police—“ACAB”—is not the same thing as spraying Brown’s image on a wall. Too often when graffiti is spotted in conflict areas, all messages are categorized under one generic ideological banner of “protest,” which denies the nuances of po-

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Graffiti on QuikTrip gas pump, Ferguson, Missouri. Photo by Tara Pham.

litical thought of those who are actively engaged. To illustrate this point, the following examples show how Ferguson graffiti specifically frames Michael Brown’s death within a larger history of police violence but in dramatically different ways. The first graffito is of nine places and dates written in marker on the side of the QuikTrip gas pump destroyed in the protest: Spain ’36 Watts ’65 Paris ’68 Italy ’77 Brixton ’81 L.A. ’92 Cincy ’01 Cairo ’11 Ferguson ’14

An I ntrodu ction to Conflict Graffiti : 11

This graffito rhetorically connects Ferguson protesters with protesters from different continents over the past seventy years. Contextualizing a history of state-­imposed violence, this graffito places the Missouri town within a global fight for marginalized people. Importantly, it is not specifically about race or police violence; rather, it internationalizes Brown’s death through instances of localized state violence. This linkage found purchase in other protests throughout the world that used Brown’s death (and the large media presence covering it) to symbolically connect to their own local protest movements. On the wall at Free Derry Corner in Northern Ireland, for example, underneath the famous “You are now entering Free Derry,” someone painted a soldier crouched down and pointing a machine gun at three figures whose hands are raised. Each figure wears a shirt that reads “Derry,” “Palestine,” or “Ferguson.” Connecting all three is the phrase “Hands up, don’t shoot!”18 In another example, the message “From Ferguson to Palestine—Resistance is not a crime. End racism now!” was sprayed on the Separation Wall dividing Palestine from Israel. A simple heart was painted underneath the words, punctuated with “STL-­ PSC.” Graffiti sutured together these separate geographic areas and complex, varied political situations, awkwardly linking the local, national, and international conversation about Ferguson. Interestingly, there is no “NYC ’14,” on the Ferguson gas pump and therefore no reference to Eric Garner, another unarmed Black man killed by police a month prior to Brown’s death. Seemingly, the graffiti writer did not want to limit the Ferguson protests to the BLM social movement but, through this omission, expand the scope to other national and international unrests. This graffito on a gas pump—itself an international symbol of the embedded state violence of extraction—refuses to spotlight Ferguson as an isolated incident, instead forcing a broadening of the historical angle. For example, in May 1968 during the Paris student uprisings, a famous graffitied message read “Under the sidewalk, the beach!”—a playful, Dadaist-­inspired apothegm ingeniously pointing to other possible worlds hidden within our current one. By referencing these dates, the graffito supplies a short international history lesson to undergird the possibilities still under the protester’s feet as they fought systematic police repression in a Missouri town in 2014.19 The gas pump graffito at the very least suggests that what is happening in the streets of Ferguson also occurred in the streets of Cincinnati or Brixton, but it is also somewhat didactic, requiring knowledge of the historical events that transpired in these places. Importantly, the graffito does not mention the specific racialized injustices revealed in Brown’s death but instead offers, on the side of a gas pump, a compact, global history lesson on the struggle against state violence. Universalizing state

12 : A n I ntrod uction to Conflict Graffiti

Protester facing police with hands up 1, Ferguson, Missouri. Photo by Scott Olsen/Getty.

violence links these disparate international civil unrests in interesting ways, but it does so by eliding the specific racial injustices localized in Ferguson. The second graffito I analyze here is most often cropped out from one of the most viral photographs to emerge from the Ferguson protests. In the photograph, the camera is behind and to the side of a Black man with a backward hat covering his long hair. Wearing a blue shirt and jeans, and a backpack hanging off of one shoulder, his hands are raised as he stares down a very frightening dystopian reality. Men in green fatigues, combat boots, armor vests, knee pads, gas masks, and helmets are pointing automatic weapons directly at him. In the photo’s frame, the lifted boots of the armed men indicate their forward motion. Adding to the visual dissonance is the word police on the shirt of one of the approaching men. This officer is not part of an army in a foreign land; he is a member of a US police force patrolling the streets of a Midwestern town with militarized weaponry. This photo is of a great many contrasts—the casual attire of the Black man with his hands up against the heavily armored white men in camouflage, weapons drawn. The two sets of participants seemingly do not

An I ntrodu ction to Conflict Graffiti : 13

Protester facing police with hands up 2, Ferguson, Missouri. Photo by Scott Olsen/Getty.

exist in the same geographic location: the Black man looks as if he is walking down a city street; the officers look as if they are in the middle of military combat. The shocking dissonance is certainly one of the reasons this image resonated so profoundly. As Angela Davis stated in an interview about Ferguson, “There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery.”20 For many, this photo is a visual representation of the violent policing of Black and Brown bodies in the United States. This iconic photo was reproduced in numerous outlets. If we expand the frame to see the full original photo, however, we can spot graffiti that speaks to the larger political struggle against racialized violence at the hands of the police. Scott Olson, a Getty photographer arrested for not staying in the police-­enforced “media pen” during the social unrest, took this photo on Wednesday, August 13, 2014. Olson was heading toward the Michael Brown memorial when he heard an explosion and photographed this encounter while running from the police charge.21 In his photo, a metal fence on one side and a blue US Post Office mailbox on the other side frames the image. On that mailbox is a hastily drawn graffitied message: “Fuck the police.”

14 : A n I ntrod uction to Conflict Graffiti

This graffito is simultaneously a full-­throated threat and a contextualization of the Ferguson protests. In reaction to the 1965 Watts uprisings, Marvin X (Marvin Jackmon) wrote a poem, “Burn, Baby, Burn,” with the line “Mother Fuck the police” to describe police interactions with Blacks within a history of enslavement, and the phrase “fuck the police” has since come to describe violent, racialized policing.22 The phrase draws the divide between the two sides in clear, intentional language. In the 1980s, the phrase became popular and more widespread with the 1988 release of N.W.A.’s album Straight Outta Compton. Ice Cube, who was born four years after the Watts uprisings and cowrote the song “Fuck tha Police” with MC Ren, stated that the song emerged from living a life in an impoverished area where there was an ideological divide between the Black community and the police: “Our people been wanting to say, ‘Fuck the police’ for the longest time. If something happened in my neighborhood, the last people we’d call was the police. Our friends get killed; they never find the killer.”23 In this interview, Ice Cube argues that the song allowed Black people to invoke the phrase together in public. In fact, at a Detroit concert, the crowd chanted the phrase repeatedly until N.W.A. began to rap—and then were quickly shut down by the police (no charges filed). From N.W.A.’s song to Public Enemy’s “911 Is a Joke” to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (the film’s main character Radio Raheem is choked to death by a white police officer, which is based on an actual killing of a graffiti writer), Black media revealed the systematic racism of policing in the United States.24 “Fuck the police” does not refer to one particular racist act by the police; it is an overall reaction to the divide between police and the Black community. If we return to Scott Olson’s photo from Ferguson of a Black man facing a large number of militarized police officers, the graffito “Fuck the police”—hastily drawn on the mailbox sometime before the action in the photo but commenting on the event as it occurred—is both a political statement and a lesson in the urban history of police violence. On the mailbox, the graffito pulled no punches; the intensity of its vulgarity matched that of the violence enacted in the streets. The N.W.A. song describes Los Angeles in the late 1980s, a place Robin D. G. Kelley has described as a “war zone”: “Police helicopters, complex electronic surveillance, even small tanks armed with battering rams became part of the increasingly militarized urban landscape.”25 The militarization of Los Angeles prefigured that of Ferguson by twenty-­five years. So from the mouth of a young Ice Cube in 1988 to a graffito on the side of a Missouri mailbox in 2014, the phrase both historicizes and resists how the state surveils and polices Black bodies using militarized weaponry to “control”

An I ntrodu ction to Conflict Graffiti : 15

the population, be it the “war on drugs” in California or the specific killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson.26 Importantly, the gas pump and mailbox graffiti rebut contradictory images that were circulating in conservative and mainstream media that categorized the unrest as a selfish riot for material goods, repeatedly showing, for example, a photo of Black men emerging with numerous bottles in their hands through the smashed-­in door of a liquor store. The graffiti described above resisted this simplistic narrative, offering an alternative understanding of the uprisings. In the days and weeks after Michael Brown’s death, these types of graffiti materialized throughout Ferguson. When they were erased with swaths of white paint, others emerged in their place. The copious graffiti made during the Ferguson protests were born of this city and of Brown’s death. The graffiti, though, were linked to previous uprisings. The routes of conflict graffiti are not direct; they often emerge in a collective consciousness. During the Ferguson protests, when men and women took to the streets to confront the police, they walked in the footsteps of earlier civil rights protesters; even if they had never participated in a protest before, their political desire compelled them to join with and follow others. It is the same for graffiti: those who wrote graffiti after Brown’s death might never before have held a spray can in their hands, but their political desire led them to join with and follow others in the swell of protest. The messiness of political graffiti becomes evident as we examine graffiti’s longer life on Ferguson’s walls and a new graffiti wave becomes apparent. Weeks after Brown’s death, the street protests dwindled in numbers and were contained, controlled, and dispersed by the police. People returned to their daily lives. Most of the overtly antipolice graffiti were erased from the walls. The graffiti, though, did not completely disappear; some of it has been published in Deborah Gambill and Ronald Montgomery’s Let’s Heal STL: Ferguson Messages in Poetry and Paint (2015). Interspersing images and poetry by Gambill and Montgomery, the book illustrates Ferguson’s “restoration” through graffiti. In their introduction, the poets explain that a small advertisement in a local newspaper asked for community member volunteers to join together to write messages and draw pictures on the boarded-­up windows of the business district damaged during the unrest. Many came, and, according to the authors, “the language of art and love went far beyond the words, and reached out with symbolism, color, and emotion to herald the local community and world about hope, peace and reconciliation.”27 Graffiti images of doves, flowers, peace signs, and the word love dominate the collection.28

16 : A n I ntrod uction to Conflict Graffiti

Graffiti image on boarded-­up building, Ferguson, Missouri. Graffiti by Phil Berwick. Photo by Dale D. Gebhardt.

Significantly, there is also a photo of a cartoonish image painted by Phil Berwick of a dwarfish white man with big hands and feet, framed by the words “Hands up let’s pray.”29 The image coincided with a social media presence—including Facebook and Twitter profiles and the hashtag #HandsUpLetsPray—that, according to a Twitter account, “is a global movement with the purpose of uniting God’s People one church, one community and one nation at a time!”30 The inclusion of this figure corresponds with Montgomery’s original poem, “Enough . . . Hands up . . . Just Pray.” Putting aside what appears to be the good intentions of the poets and the community members, young and old, who painted the walls, it is important to understand how this wave of graffiti interacts with previous waves. The graffiti on the gas pump and the mailbox in Ferguson speak to a specific moment of resistance. As the city began to restore order, the universalizing of the “message” began in earnest. Instead of “Fuck the po-

An I ntrodu ction to Conflict Graffiti : 17

lice,” page after page of images in the book are universal platitudes, such as “Be good to each other,” “Peace for Ferguson,” “We R one,” and “Even in the darkest of nights there is hope.”31 In these sprayed messages, there are no guilty parties or systemic racism. Instead, the messages reflect an individual responsibility to “be good.” These graffiti reframe the conflict, neutralizing any pointed political attacks. Speaking of a community as “one” instead of identifying the real, deep divisions between Black and white, rich and poor, police and protesters paints over the wounds laid bare in Brown’s death and restores a racial status quo. This reframing of the protest surfaces in the painfully tone-­deaf “Hands up let’s pray” photo reprinted in the book. Michael Brown’s alleged last position taken in his life was with his hands up; he was still shot six times, twice in the head and four times in the right arm. “Hands up let’s pray” erases this specific action that Brown used to protect himself and the material conditions that young Black men face every day in the United States. Instead, the message promotes protection from a mystical higher power (curiously enough depicted as a white male figure).32 The inclusion of a few graffitied “All lives matter” throughout the book underscores the racialized framework that pushes back against the BLM movement, turning attention away from Black people being killed by police to a generic, universalizing “all lives.” Overall, the graffiti “healing” of Ferguson that the book pre­sents is self-­evidently an economic one, as evidenced in the image of a white dove with an “Open” sign in its mouth on the boarded-­up glass door of a local business. Generic messages of peace ignore the specific material conditions that led to Brown’s death and the subsequent protests. In its “hope” for a return to an economic and racial “normal,” this type of graffiti symbolically erases the racialized physical violence that is meted out on the street. Taken together, the 2014 Ferguson graffiti can be understood as various graffiti waves that mirrored the (d)evolution of the conflict itself. Violent conflicts often seem to erupt out of nowhere; during the first wave, graffiti often anticipates and/or announces the nascent conflict. The signs are literally the writing on the wall, expressing citizens’ political desires. In some conflicts, the marks are few and quickly erased. At the beginning of the 2010 Green Revolution in Iran, sprayed green Vs began appearing in Tehran’s streets during the middle of the night. These letters prefigured the protests that would be brutally repressed shortly afterward.33 Before the Bronx burned in the summer of 1977, graffiti could be found throughout the poor sections of the city, with tags vying for space on the city’s public housing. As either a whisper, as in Iran, or a roar, as in the Bronx, graffiti is often present in an area before violence and protests erupt, anticipating calls for action.

18 : A n I ntrod uction to Conflict Graffiti

As the conflict turns to overt violence, a larger, second wave of graffiti appears in conjunction with protesters on the street. From Cairo’s tear-­ gassed streets to the Katrina-­flooded streets of New Orleans, examples throughout this book illustrate the ways that community members used graffiti to magnify their voices in the conflict’s chaotic violence. These voices speak in numerous dialects, aesthetic forms, and political positionings. It is this wave of graffiti that is most recognized (even if mere background) because of the media focus on the conflict. The third wave of conflict graffiti transpires after the physical violence has subsided and an area lurches into a tenuous postconflict situation. Here graffiti often transforms again, moving nonlinearly from a voice of minority protest to one of majority suppression. Graffiti aesthetics, which in the first two waves often call attention to blatant inequalities in a community, slowly change. Shorn of uncomfortable politics, “beautiful” images dot the neighborhood, embodying generic universal themes rather than advocating against specific injuries. In some societies devastated by conflicts, entrepreneurs, seeing profit in a neighborhood in flux, often use graffiti to sell a “new,” postconflict area to the highest bidder. These waves, though, are never perfectly formed or clearly demarcated. Dependent on political tides and environmental forces, they crash down upon a particular area, mixing together in giant, messy pools of competing ideological desire. For example, political graffiti was an important resistive tool for Palestinians during the First Intifada as they defied Israeli occupation of their land. At the same time, in raids through Palestinian villages, Israeli soldiers wrote graffiti inside the homes of Palestinians, signaling to soldiers who would come after them particular directional pathways and leaving intimidating messages for the occupants of the homes.34 US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan tagged latrines with graffiti to blow off steam; others were under orders to use graffiti to sow unrest in villages, thereby opening up spaces for US intervention.35 The speed with which multinational corporations used revolutionary graffiti lettering to sell expensive cars to Egyptians shortly after the Tahrir Square demonstrations was both shocking and significant. As Ammar Abo Bakr and other revolutionaries were painting antigovernment slogans and murals of dead protesters on the walls of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Fiat Chrysler adopted the graffiti style to sell the “dream” of a post-­Mubarak society in ads throughout Cairo that showcased the personal “freedom” a Jeep Cherokee could bring an individual.36 In gentrified downtown Detroit, where street art and graffiti are heralded as helping “save” the city by making it appealing to the affluent, others resist gentrification with pointed, guerilla-­style graffiti raids on buildings. In all of these places,

An I ntrodu ction to Conflict Graffiti : 19

the competing graffiti waves interact and mix together. Some waves are overpowered and break apart; others form larger, messy swells. No matter the wave, graffiti are often encountered as fetishized aesthetic objects. On Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, and other social media sites, millions of disembodied images of graffiti are posted. Where the individual pieces of graffiti originally appeared—street, neighborhood, city, country—is often undiscernible. Graffiti, though, are historically framed physical phenomena. On walls during a conflict they physically interject themselves into the larger political environment. They enact a performance of resistance, defying a dominant narrative of ubiquitous state power. Graffiti is one tool of resistance among many that reveal the cracks in state power by writing over it. To understand graffiti’s subversive performative power is to explore the state’s performance of its own power through the built environment. These dueling performances are locked in a dialectic struggle; to appreciate the former, one must recognize the latter.

graffiti ’ s geographies In much scholarly analysis and public discussion, graffiti are often encountered as fetishized aesthetic objects. They are ahistorical clickbait, with little reference made to the walls, streets, and public spaces to which they are attached. My analysis in chapter 1 centers the walls themselves, contextualizing how graffiti transforms them into sites of resistance. I start with border walls—specifically between Israel and Palestine and the United States and Mexico—structures built on the edges of nations with lethal shadows that fall upon certain populations within and outside the walls’ boundaries. Moving from border walls to walls lining a nation’s streets reveals the connections between street protests and conflict graffiti, an important, though often unacknowledged, relationship. The chapter also teases out these connections by placing into dialogue Jürgen Habermas’s ideas of democratic “consensus building” with Chantal Mouffe’s theories of political “antagonisms” in order to identify the politics of writing and reading graffiti in the public sphere. “Walls work!” is a rallying cry of politicians demanding bigger and longer border walls; here I focus on how they perform their work, which lays the foundation for us to interpret how graffiti responds with its own counterperformances. The subsequent chapters focus on graffiti in specific environments. Chapter 2 examines political desire as articulated and interpreted through graffiti in Egypt during the revolutionary days of 2011 when millions of protesters took to the streets demanding the removal of Presi-

20 : A n I ntrod uction to Conflict Graffiti

dent Hosni Mubarak. I interviewed numerous writers and artists in Cairo, Alexandria, and Luxor who participated in the uprising, and this chapter demonstrates the importance of exploring the vastly different messages found on Cairo’s walls. While the so-­called Arab Spring has become synonymous with “revolutionary graffiti,” this chapter argues that graffiti is an amorphous, far-­from-­uniform tool in the overall political project of revolution, revealing the contours of competing political desires expressed on the walls. Assembling a fluid territory of graffiti allows for a nuanced understanding of revolutionary desire. And then there’s Banksy. Chapter 3 focuses on how Banksy’s street art interacts with a geopolitical conflict. Focusing on Banksy’s murals on the Israeli Separation Wall, I argue that while “tourist” graffiti brings international attention to a conflict, this branded graffiti often erases the people and the colonized land that the graffiti are supposed to spotlight. To explore this contradiction, I compare Banksy’s murals with Teresa Fernández’s art interventions on the US border wall, Murad Subay’s graffiti murals in his war-­torn Yemen, and Palestinian graffiti writers during the First Intifada. While much of Banksy’s work erases Palestinians and the disputed land that is an essential part of the Israeli-­Palestinian conflict, others have used their art to call attention to both the victims and the land that these walls—and conflicts—bisect. Chapter 4 explores the concept of conflict graffiti during a so-­called natural disaster that is also inherently a sociopolitical conflict. When Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans, media often conceptually framed the city as a “war zone,” with Black and poor victims portrayed either as enemy combatants intent to rampage or as refugees without rights. Graffiti voiced opposition to these generic narratives, continually forcing a recognition of the dispossessed within the city. By looking to first responders, storm victims, and the New Orleans graffiti subculture, I compare how each, representing different communities with varied interests and desires, used graffiti to counter Katrina’s effects. In the post-­ Katrina disaster of New Orleans, new conflicts emerged, anchored in the racial politics of the city’s history. Post-­Katrina graffiti, for example, has been a tool to “art wash” away from sight poor minority communities, prepping them for gentrification as a “war zone” transforms into a “boutique city.”37 Focusing on the uneasy connection between graffiti and real estate, and concentrating on the relationship between an African American graffiti artist and a white real estate developer, I examine how conflict graffiti transforms into recognizable and profitable street art. Chapter 5 begins at the moment of gentrification in Detroit, and articulates ways that graffiti and street art are radically changing the former car-­making capital of the world as it recovers from its declaration

An I ntrodu ction to Conflict Graffiti : 21

Graffiti in train station, Kowloon City, Hong Kong. Photo by Kevin Young.

of bankruptcy in 2013. The chapter situates Detroit with other cities— Miami, São Paulo, Philadelphia—and how they all embrace street art to “improve” city infrastructure, which is part and parcel of racial capitalism’s rebranding of city space. It is not always a smooth transition; from downtown “Gilbertville” to Heidelberg Street and Grand River Avenue, racialized politics and subsequent “graffiti wars” resulted from street-­art campaigns. Finally, the conclusion contextualizes the initial wave of COVID-­19 graffiti in the spring and summer of 2020. Despite a pandemic that—again, at the time of writing—has infected more than 100 million and killed nearly 2.5 million people, nations were initially slow to react and quick in their attempts to return to pre-­COVID-­19 normalcy. But as nation after nation implemented curfews or “safer-­at-­home” policies restricting movement along city streets, graffiti writers and street artists took to writing their messages on the empty city’s walls. The most exciting and politically useful of these are graffiti emerging from anti-­austerity movements with

22 : A n I ntrod uction to Conflict Graffiti

histories of using graffiti as a tool for dissent. Graffiti on a Hong Kong subway platform during the 2019 protests captures the most political salient message of this type of graffiti: “There can be no return to normal, because normal was the problem in the first place.” This sentiment rings true in the recent BLM graffiti and in protests on walls and streets throughout the United States in the spring and summer of 2020, in the aftermath of the killing by police of yet another Black man in yet another American city, this time being George Floyd in Minneapolis. Emerging and sharing space on walls and streets, COVID-­19 and BLM conflict graffiti both voice a resounding no to a racialized and class-­based “normalcy.” Instead, they point us to imagined possibilities.

1 : WALLS, STREETS, AND PUBLIC SPACES

I no longer know what there is behind this wall, I no longer know there is a wall, I no longer know this wall is a wall, I no longer know what a wall is. I no longer know that in my apartment there are walls, and if there weren’t any walls, there would be no apartment. george s pere c, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

We shut the doors behind us to enclose ourselves within the walls of a room. A basic element of all homes and buildings, a wall’s solidness allows it to go unnoticed as a commonplace visual security blanket, one that we cover with pictures of loved ones. We gently pierce the skin of a wall with nails to hold up the frames that contain our memories. These frames with the faces of our children, our parents, our lovers, and our friends become the focal points of a wall, making it a mere background to how we pre­sent our rooms to any visitors we allow in. We don’t consciously question the validity of these walls—they are hard, strong, and functional. The world is outside; we are inside. That division helps produce a sense of security, permitting us to shut off the lights, burrow under blankets, and fall peacefully asleep. When I visited the Aida refugee camp, located about a mile north of Beit Jala in the central West Bank, I spoke with a man who has witnessed the holes in homes produced by Israelis and their weaponry. Seeing abject destruction firsthand, he understood that soldiers could enter his room at any time during the night or simply destroy the walls to get in otherwise. This older man, sitting in a backless chair, had witnessed the violent reality of conflict, of his walls having lost their security. No longer solid separators between inside and out, this man’s walls were always in a state of potential erasure. The walls lost their hardness, their strength, and their functionality. This refugee’s privacy was instead permeated by

24 : Chap ter One

the overall Israeli-­Palestinian conflict, his private space melding into one amorphous dangerous public space. This refugee’s personal walls became unknowable because of the material reality of “The Wall.” Described by the Israeli government as an “anti-­terrorist fence,” this $3 billion wall has been built incrementally since 2002, slowly closing off spaces and people.1 The Separation Wall, made of eight-­meter-­high concrete slabs and fences weaving their way along fiercely contested borders between Israeli and Palestinian land, is a barrier that is the epitome of Foucault’s governmentality. Planned and built according to an evolving strategy, the Separation Wall has reshaped “the distribution of inter-­visibilities, define[d] flows of circulation . . . determine[d] the possibilities and impossibilities of encounters.”2 For this old man in the Aida refugee camp, the Separation Wall made “what is behind the wall” unknowable. The wall, anchored firmly in the land and patrolled by soldiers who can deploy artillery within minutes, is a border keeping Israel unknown to Palestinians—if they even come near the wall, they are dealt with as potential terrorists. Walls, however, are material and immaterial; the very physical wall sharply cutting through the two nations has ideological influence outside the site lines of its own presence: no matter where Palestinians are in relation to the wall, Israel sees them as potential terrorists. The wall’s immaterial presence in Palestinian lives has deep repercussions in daily life, much like Georges Perec’s epigraph to this chapter: “I no longer know what there is behind this wall.” The Separation Wall has made Israel unknowable for those who live within the Aida camp, but their homeland of “Palestine” has been made enigmatic as well. This man is always enclosed behind the Separation Wall, and in turn, the walls of his own home are rendered equally unknowable. In conflict areas, what has always been previously clear—for example, the walls of your home are walls—­suddenly becomes opaque. But although this refugee’s walls have become something he can’t quite recognize, the Separation Wall is viciously knowable. The Separation Wall is the focal point for Palestinian resistance to Israeli policy. The wall is a symbol of overall Israeli incursion into Palestinian land and also the actual barrier blocking Palestinians from their ancestral homes, which were confiscated during the Nakba in 1948, when more than seven hundred thousand Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes during the war with Israel. When people place paint on the wall with statements or images in opposition to Israeli governability, they are, in essence, trying to make the walls of their own homes knowable again (plate 1). By painting what some Palestinians have called the “Apartheid Wall” with slogans, pictures, or even advertisements, they are re-

Walls, Streets, and Public Spaces : 25

vealing the wall in a new light, reimagining its surface, and forcing it to be legible in a different script, from a new hand. The Separation Wall has physical and ideological influence on walls throughout Palestine and the world; many of those who write protest graffiti on the border wall are attempting to resist this brutal authority, to rebuild their own walls in their own homes. When Israel ordered the Separation Wall to be built, it simultaneously created a public space to resist it. At the edges of the disputed borderlands between Israel and Palestine, the wall is a space for resistive efforts against the occupation of Palestinian land. This chapter will focus on walls—both border walls and city walls—in order to understand how spray paint can be used in opposition to state repression. A border wall is a physical and ideological barrier; graffiti is one material and symbolic tool used to combat state policy. The Separation Wall physically manifests a Zionist political desire, articulated by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin when he campaigned for office in 1992 under the slogan that Israeli-­Palestinian relations should be simply “Us here. Them there.”3 “Here” and “there” are, of course, arbitrary. Regardless of this Zionist wish, the border between Israel and Palestine is not completely closed.4 Undoubtedly imposing, the Separation Wall is a working border: seventy thousand Palestinians are allotted daily work permits to legally cross into Israel from the West Bank and another twenty thousand to thirty thousand sneak through drainage pipes and holes in the wall and fences to get to work and see family.5 Israel, somewhat reliant on Palestinian labor (and many Palestinians are dependent on wages from Israel), allows Palestinians—under heavy surveillance—to walk through the wall to arrive at their jobs. In this sense, the wall is malleable, stopping some people and allowing others to go through; what seems to be a solid mass, then, has surprising openings. “Walls work” rhetorically justifies the building of border walls, but the work those walls do is much more complicated than just stopping people from crossing a border. The Separation Wall is one of many state-­sponsored barriers imposed with great fanfare, heated opposition, and limited results. Even before Donald Trump’s bombastic demand for a “great” wall between the United States and Mexico (discussed later), the 2006 Secure Fence Act passed by Congress called for the completion of an 850-­mile wall and fence separating Mexico from parts of California, Arizona, and Texas.6 This wall, the second most famous barrier wall in the world, was built with many of the same subcontracting firms and uses similar surveillance technologies. The two further seek to legitimize each other as state lawmakers from Israel and the United States point to the other for their justification.7 During Trump’s presidency both of these walls were often in the news, but they are only two of the many walls that zigzag along national bor-

26 : Chap ter One

ders. Saudi Arabia, for example, is building a 1,100-­mile fence along the Yemen border that includes numerous ten-­foot-­high concrete walls.8 Uzbekistan built a wall on its disputed border with Kyrgyzstan; government officials claimed it was for security purposes, and critics argued that the wall building was a state-­sponsored land grab.9 Botswana constructed a barrier between itself and Zimbabwe ostensibly to stop the spread of foot-­and-­mouth disease across nations but also, and more important, to stop the movements of migrants into the country from its poorer neighbor.10 In the autonomous North African cities of Ceuta and Melilla, Spain built high-­tech border infrastructure, complete with infrared sensors and imposing walls, to curb migrants from leaving Africa and crossing the Strait of Gibraltar.11 China built walls to keep Korean refugees out of the country, and North Korea erected its own walls to keep out the Chinese. As millions of refugees from Syria, Iraq, and other states experience devastating humanitarian catastrophes, a steady stream of politicians, backed by the rise of ultraconservative parties in the United States, France, Germany, Poland, and other European countries, have demanded more walls to keep (an interchangeable) “them” out. All governments claim that border walls, erected for a variety of political, economic, and social reasons, exist for one primary reason: protection. A nation’s sovereignty rests upon the bedrock idea that the government can protect the nation’s people. In the twenty-­first century, this idea is eroding quickly, revealing fault lines created by the neoliberal policies that have spurred the migrations of people, capital, and cultures. Numerous suicide bombings throughout the Middle East; massive “theatrical” killings in cities such as Paris, London, and Madrid; and the 2001 destruction of New York’s World Trade Center—all have symbolically cast doubt about the ability of nations to protect their citizens. The increased number of border walls attest to ways states react to such vulnerabilities through material and symbolic performances of power. By building imposing walls, politicians can stand in front of them in choreographed photo ops, emphasizing the physical structure in order to allay the psychological fears of citizens. This type of border structure, according to Trevor Boddy, is an architecture of “dis-­assurance.”12 The walls are emblems, large symbolic illustrations that the state is “doing something” to protect its citizens. An analogue to the color-­coded “threat level” in the United States, these walls (or sometimes steel slats) show the state as consistently on red alert. They are visual manifestations of the state’s rhetoric that it can protect its citizens from “aliens” intent on harming the country, whether terrorists, drug runners, or “thieves” of jobs and services.13 Fears of terrorists blowing themselves up and migrants finding employment are ideologically con-

Walls, Streets, and Public Spaces : 27

nected at their base: both reflect a fear of “barbarians” at the gate ready to infiltrate the “civilized” nation. Wendy Brown brilliantly shows in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty that such walls are, in actuality, highly ineffective and costly structures that, at best, funnel bodies, capital, and violence into equally dangerous alternative routes (like the Israeli wall) and, at worst, are obviously ineffective (like the US-­Mexican border fence). As Janet Napolitano, former Arizona governor and secretary of homeland security under Barack Obama, once stated, “You show me a 50-­foot fence and I’ll show you a 51-­foot ladder at the border.”14 Walls do not effectively keep migrants out of the United States: this becomes clear when considering the large number of Irish migrants working construction jobs in Woodside, Queens, or of Mexican migrants picking strawberries in central Florida. In reality, these migrants are an integral part of the nation’s disposable, low-­cost labor force.15 If these walls are costly and ineffective, why do politicians and large swaths of the population favor them? As one rancher on the Arizona-­ Mexican border cynically but accurately stated, “The government isn’t controlling the border, it’s controlling what Americans think of the border.”16 Such large walls allow people to point to a physical object of deterrence, which reassures them of the state’s power. In the age of globalization, however, national sovereignty has been partially forfeited to a global market, and the flow of the multitude, to use Hardt and Negri’s term, is transnational.17 These walls are not meant to stop invading national armies, but rather individuals—potential terrorists, poor people, smugglers, asylum seekers, among others—whose numbers proliferate at certain historical moments and reduce at others. Although border walls may deter certain actors, they cannot stop the flow completely. In that way they have been likened to dams, since the flow of people can be, at times, somewhat regulated. As Hurricane Katrina proved, though, through its devastation of New Orleans in 2005, storm surges can catastrophically breach even the biggest walls. But despite the breaches revealing their ineffectiveness, at moments of perceived political crises, the cry for bigger walls is exponentially louder. The desire to see the government physically “doing something” spurs politicians to pour money into lucrative building contracts for bigger border walls. Wall building is a centerpiece of Donald Trump’s political performance. During the 2016 US presidential campaign, when Trump labeled Mexican migrants as rapists and thieves, hyperbolically announcing that, if elected, he would force the Mexican government to pay for a “beautiful” wall across the whole southern border, he raised the specter of the 9/11 terrorist attack and manufactured consent of the populace by play-

28 : Chap ter One

ing on an exaggerated fear of enemy combatants entering the United States. But his performance also evoked the specter of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the post-­2008 recession, with its high unemployment and loss of (white) working-­class manufacturing jobs. He was playing with xenophobic and masculine tropes of the wealthy white male forcing the poor brown Mexican subordinate to do his bidding.18 By linking racist rhetoric to an actual physical object, he declared himself a political “outsider” who knew who belonged inside the United States. A platform that involves walling terrorists “out” and keeping jobs “in” is fear-­mongering fiction. Even still, Trump’s claims that Mexico would build his border wall proved beneficial by directly playing to his political base’s fear of losing their jobs by race-­blaming “foreign” labor. Despite outrage elsewhere, his poll numbers rose sharply, and he was the darling to a certain subsection of the Republican Party, which positioned him to become the nominee in a crowded field of candidates. As Walter Benjamin states in “On the Concept of History,” “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule.”19 Trump’s fear-­mongering xenophobia is not novel but a significant part of US immigration history. Examples from the nineteenth century abound—from the West Coast border closing to contain the “yellow menace” to the numerous signs in stores throughout the East Coast that “Irish need not apply.” In the twentieth century, US policy evolved to intern people of selected races, such as the reprehensible internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. In the twenty-­first century, fear of Muslim extremists has created the ambiguous “war on terror,” allowing for structures of counterterrorism to “enhance” policing and surveillance against Arab Americans.20 In effect, Trump’s proposal to extend the physical wall along the US-­Mexican border and his virtual wall in the form of his ban on Muslims entering the United States are not outside of the US political norm. Rather, they are twenty-­first-­century reiterations of nineteenth- and twentieth-­century policies to keep “them” away from “us.” A border wall’s power lies in its physicality, but it enacts its power symbolically. Boddy explains that during conflict, public architecture “shifts from the pragmatic into the emblematic.”21 Even if most people in the United States understand that walls do not effectively keep noncitizens outside the country, border walls “resurrect myths of national autonomy and purity in a globalized world.”22 For a man synonymous with a brand, Trump used the physical wall to prevent the racialized “other” from interfering with US “purity.” The wall, then, emblematizes state security and sovereignty, a reason Trump declared a “national emergency” when Congress refused to capitulate to his demands for $5 billion to fund the wall

Walls, Streets, and Public Spaces : 29

(that Mexico did not pay for). For him, the symbolism is more important than reality. As Trump campaigned for additional funding, he frequently (and creepily) elaborated on how “alien” male “criminals” would bind, torture, and sexually assault innocent American women, projecting a nationalist rape fantasy that argues that America’s “purity” must be salvaged.23 Through his rhetoric, the border wall has become a memorial to the xenophobic ideas he embraces, the physical representation of his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.” The border wall, therefore, allows for a (mythical) separation between “them” and “us.” Although this identifying process is fluid, because of its materiality, a razor-­wire-­topped concrete wall is far from amorphous. A barrier wall’s “realness” creates, as Edward Said postulated, an “imaginative geography” defining identities through the bordering of spaces. The rhetorical function places the emphasis on the means of protection—the wall—and not the people the wall keeps out (and in). Walls ground the ideology of “security” by physically making individuals unseen, thereby rhetorically making the men and women trying to cross the border for a variety of reasons singularly and stereotypically “illegals” with one story: they are Trump’s “bad hombres.” The individual migrants seeking asylum or illegally entering the country for a wide variety of economic and safety concerns are replaced by an imaginary horde of terrorists—“them”— stopped in their tracks at the base of the wall. Individuals become invisible, psychologically replaced with a horde of dangerous “others” who need to be kept away from a nationalistic “us.” These border walls, therefore, are ritualistic security performances meant to put on a good show, erasing individuals and replacing them with well-­worn stereotypes. The walls’ material hardness allows for the nation-­state to pro­ject a simplistic rhetoric of security into a complex national debate. There is no abstraction to what a border wall is supposed to do: keep people on one side of it. Trump, who made his (supposed) billions by placing his name on buildings, knows the value of having a physical—and simple—object as a symbol of national security. But the national script is projected, not written, onto the wall. In reality, these walls are huge blank spaces, a perfect canvas for graffiti. Like walls, graffiti are both physical and symbolic. Counteracting the nationalistic performance of border walls, graffiti can be read as ritualistic counterperformances that cover this blankness with images and words, creating narratives of resistance that rhetorically make marginalized individuals—the women and men who wrote the graffiti—visible. We might not see them, but in reading the graffiti, we know they exist and do not fit readily the stereotypes of the “bad hombre” or sadistic terrorist. Each mark is another individual performance against the wall: a curse,

30 : Chap ter One

an aside, a plea, a joke. The hands who wrote the graffiti may no longer be observable, but the statements are visible and, in the very fact that they are on these walls, accusatory. When individuals leave marks, more painted indictments and demands join them. As they cover the blankness of the walls, the projected national script weakens, and the security projected by the solid walls is shown to have many holes. The culminating visualization of protest is a testament to what we already know but must be consistently reminded of: walls can be breached, toppled, destroyed. For all their perceived invincibility, they are vulnerable to collectivized hands that want to tear them down. Graffiti subversively interacts with the state, often turning the emblem of state power into a symbol of resistance. These dialogic performances and counterperformances between the state and graffiti writers do not take place, of course, only on border walls but also on walls throughout the nation. Here, the area of conflict is more dispersed but the performances of security and graffiti’s counterperformances are no less important. Before discussing how graffiti participates in these counterperformances, it’s important to examine the environments where the graffiti is applied—the concrete, streets, and public spheres—that are in themselves material and ideological receptacles of state power.

concrete Walls are constructed of a variety of materials depending on geographic location and economic circumstances. One of the most popular of modern building materials in cities throughout the world is concrete, which has had an immeasurable impact on the modern world. Rediscovered in the late nineteenth century, concrete was not widely used until the end of the millennium, when, because of its dense mass, appearance of strength, and economic viability, it became a favorite of builders. As Adrian Forty romantically states of concrete as a building block of modernity, “Its structural possibilities allow us to redirect our destiny, to build bridges and superhighways where none could be built before, to hold back the sea, to join continents, to build cities at densities which would previously have resulted only in unbearable squalor, to reverse or to overcome the forces of nature so that mankind can live in greater comfort and security.”24 Hiding in the background of this tribute is that all of concrete’s accomplishments are dependent upon state intervention. Security is a key aspect—perhaps the primary aspect—for the welfare of the state and its people, countenancing for these infrastructures to be built. Concrete’s role in the modern world’s creation is somewhat perplexing. One of modernity’s central tenets is the interaction of mobility and speed.

Walls, Streets, and Public Spaces : 31

Separation Wall, guard tower, and graffiti, near Bethlehem. Photo by John Lennon.

The modern world became “modern” because it was able to move, fast. One need only to think of Dziga Vertov’s famous 1929 paean to the Soviet cities of Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow, and Odessa in Man with a Movie Camera: the director’s camera captures cities forming at full speed. Trains, buses, and bicycles zoom past women and men who seem to contain the same amount of boundless kinetic energy. The directions of all participants are unknown as they run off the screen, but the speed at which they are moving shows they are determined to get somewhere. The modern

32 : Chap ter One

city—be it Moscow, Berlin, or New York—embodies the chaotic possibilities that mobility and speed offer. Interestingly, concrete, an important building block of the modern city, seems to also be its antithesis: if the city forms at breakneck speed, the city’s architecture is structured on stability. At the same time that Vertov’s silent film captures the movements of individual flights of people and machines, allowing one to hear the cacophony of modern life, the buildings these men and women are hurriedly entering or leaving stay still, substantial, and mute. Aligned with this muteness, concrete is visually uninteresting. Unlike uniquely shaped stones that must individually be fitted with other stones when building a wall, one section of a concrete wall is not much different from another. Stones are natural, giving the wall a varying texture; concrete is artificial. Unlike load-­bearing structures, reinforced concrete is isotropic, diffusing force equally in all directions. Concrete’s power derives from this feature. Although ornaments or facades might be applied to concrete to embellish certain walls, the “beauty” of the bare, blank concrete wall is its reproducible structural integrity.25 Concrete’s reproducible strength has a corresponding psychological property as well: security. The Janus face of modernity’s mobility and speed is the stable built environment. This security was a fundamental part of communist architects’ plans when rebuilding New Belgrade in Yugoslavia after World War II, as well as for the designs of the concrete buildings and structures erected throughout the Czech Republic from World War II until the Velvet Revolution in 1989. These communist countries wanted the massive unadorned concrete slabs to pro­ject the unbending, solid will of the state.26 Communist countries were not alone in using concrete. For some architects in other countries, the utopian possibilities of the modern city were built on this aura of security that concrete conjured. Churches were some of the first large concrete buildings constructed in the nineteenth century. For a wide swath of governments, churches are sacred structures whose walls are meant to house the vulnerable in areas of conflict; they give shelter to the homeless in time of great economic need and offer sanctuary to those at immediate risk of death from enemy combatants.27 The stability of a concrete church, therefore, offers those living in chaos some sense of protection. Concrete, though, also has uses for the profane: the concrete forming the housing estate in Hitler’s Germany in 1934 was described by the Third Reich as “a purely German product, a symbol of warriors,” because, like the young Nazi soldiers, concrete becomes harder over time.28 Concrete, therefore, is a material substance molded to house a gamut of ideological practices, be they large, state-­run practices or smaller, subversive counterpractices. Concrete is a formation of water, sand, and Portland cement. Cement, a

Walls, Streets, and Public Spaces : 33

building block of concrete, is a substance that, when first combined with water, is wet and malleable. A child named Sally may joyously scratch her name into the soupy surface of a drying sidewalk; every day when she walks by it, her name is embedded there. This simple act of writing emphasizes a particular identity and fuses it into the sidewalk. For Sally, this may feel like “her” section of the walk to school. Another girl, being more mischievous, might write the word fuck into the wet substance; when it dries, the profanity is present for all to see, outraging some, giving others a quick laugh. In both instances, small indentations are made into the cement’s surface, creating crevices in which dirt particles will attach. Whether out of self-­affirmation or a bit of mischief, these girls’ actions are tiny cuts to the integrity of the city’s surface. These small writing acts inscribed into the cement structurally contain a captured moment of personal history that is part of the public domain. The sidewalk’s functionality is augmented by words embedded into its surface. When passersby read them, the words might slow their step for a brief moment before they move onward. These small writing acts are not revolutionary. The girls are not leading a conscious charge against the neoliberal city or acting out a Situationist-­ inspired declaration of independence. They are having a bit of fun. To romanticize these writings as revolutionary manifestos does not help us contextualize these types of marks, especially when we soon transition from girls writing in cement on their way to school to women spray-­ painting on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in Egypt in 2011 as the army fired bird shot at them. What I am highlighting is that the girls’ etching into the cement physically changes the sidewalk—in a miniscule way—and thus, in an equally small way, changes the city. These writing acts participate in city life. As Raphael Schacter explains, this is why the influential early twentieth-­century architect and critic Adolf Loos wrote passionately of having streets “glisten like white walls.” Loos’s utopian ideals, described in a lecture reprinted as Ornament and Crime (1913), is a modernist celebration of smooth surfaces and the removal of all forms of ornament (ornamentation is the aesthetic “crime” Loos refers to in his title).29 Concrete is Loos’s ideal substance because it whitewashes everything. Loos, however, could not stem the tide. In some instances, cement amplifies an individual’s mark. In the previous example, the sidewalk becomes a memorial to the girls’ impulsive actions. When heading to work, commuters, if they are looking, will notice the indentions and not the sidewalk itself. In this case, the altered sidewalk, designed to allow pedestrians to move quickly through the city streets, slows them down. It’s Loos’s worst nightmare: the whiteness of the plain surface does not silently glisten but vulgarly talks back, identifying particular individual

34 : Chap ter One

acts of inscription rather than the smooth architecture of the metropolis itself. In Loos’s utopian architectural philosophy, the city resists embedded memories; the walls glisten white without a living history. These girls, however, articulated and memorialized a sacred-­profane history in the cement. Cement and concrete are used when constructing a city because of its hardness, durability, and sameness. In the examples here, these modernist building blocks further absorb the city around them, changing as individuals interact with them. For all its supposed blandness, concrete contains many contrary properties and exciting possibilities. Loos wanted a city that did not tattoo its history on its skin. But a city is a living, breathing entity that absorbs the desires of the people inhabiting it and pro­jects those desires for others to see. As it is for the girls writing in wet cement, writing graffiti on walls is a manifestation of this desire. Jacques Derrida teaches us that “a city is a memory and promise which are never confused with the totality of what is presently visible, presentable, constructed, habitable.”30 Walls are therefore in a constant state of flux. As Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift qualify, so, too, is the city. In their many articles on the contemporary metropolis, they urge readers to visualize the city as a process, a hegemonic formation that, while designed by urban planners, is created through the quotidian lives of its inhabitants. Far from thinking of city space in terms of permanence, they suggest we imagine the city as a convergence of chaotic relationships all vying for position. In this way, the city, as Tim Cresswell coins, becomes a heretical geography, “one that is never static and fixed but always sometimes minutely changing as a result of the continuing struggle between dominant and subordinate cultural groups.”31 This struggle is both a physical and a symbolic performance, interacting with an area’s landscape. For example, Iain Borden, in his outstanding work on skateboarder culture, illustrates the performative relationship between skateboarder and city as one that allows the individual to experience the metropolis as a living entity.32 Borden, extrapolating from Amin and Thrift’s view of “city as process,” shows how these creative acts lead to much pleasure (as well as danger) to the individual riding through the city’s streets. For Borden, and skateboarder and performance artist scholars like Dani Abulhawa, notions of play are the foundation of the interaction: a joyful experience between individuals and the metropolis in which the built environment provides spaces for pleasurable activities that its structures were not originally designed to accommodate.33 Monuments are not revered but revealed to be the perfect platform for tricks—railings help lift individuals up into the air; they don’t stabilize them on the stairs. For these skateboarders, knowing the city becomes a process of (re)inventing the city on

Walls, Streets, and Public Spaces : 35

their own terms for their own bodily and psychic pleasure.34 Much like graffiti writers do, they interact with the city’s constructed environment, altering it to fulfill their own desires. To return to Amin and Thrift, then, the city is “not . . . an arrangement of fixed sites but . . . a confluence of relationships that are constantly reworked.”35 As the girls writing their names and curse words in concrete show, the personal interaction with the city puts into practice Amin and Thrift’s theories. Concrete contains the city’s history and holds—even for a short time—its memories. The wet cement captured the girls’ personal memories, but concrete also offers the possibility of containing national ones. Forty identifies concrete monuments as a physical incarnation of a nation’s memory. Concrete, though, is a curious building choice for these large, sanctioned vessels of a state’s history because it has been “so generally associated with the erasure and obliteration of memory.”36 A construction worker’s trowel smooths the concrete’s surface, evening out any bumps or indentions; she sets up signs around the wet mass so the concrete may harden without disruption. The concrete’s blandness is essential; the way the concrete molds into the memorial’s form—a horse-­riding general with his sword drawn, a president holding his hand aloft—focuses attention on the subject of the memorial and not the substance of its building material. It is concrete’s strength that gives the figure of the memorial its weight and (seeming) permanence. The statue of the president with arm held high in victory, for example, is secure in its base, psychologically containing the adulation of past adoring crowds while simultaneously projecting future ones. Placed in a public square, the memorial, which performs the important function of solidifying a national memory, secures an ideological future as well. Until, of course, it doesn’t.37 One only has to remember the viral images of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue on April 9, 2003, in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, when US Marines wrapped a chain around the statue and brought it crashing down. Iraqi citizens paraded through the streets of Baghdad with pieces of Hussein’s decapitated head.38 What was a physical testament to Hussein’s life prior to the US invasion became a symbolic beheading of the dictator, prefiguring his eventual military execution. As Dylan Trigg writes succinctly of memorials, “Monuments become anti-­monuments as soon as their symbolic association has been subverted.”39 The smashed statue represented the loss of political power, revealing a president and a Ba’athist government no longer in control. The statue meant to pro­ject stability became a symbolic target of anti-­Hussein forces. This image of the toppling statue went viral. A more unknown attack upon it, though, had occurred earlier the same day when Kadhem Sharif, the personal strength coach of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, went after

36 : Chap ter One

the statue with a sledgehammer. His individual onslaught indented the base.40 Others threw shoes and road debris. The strength and security concrete belies may certainly be overmatched; walls and monuments, like dictators, can be toppled. Concrete eventually breaks down over time, revealing intrusions into its surface; so, too, can the memory embodied by the statue fracture. The statue of Hussein was realistic, imposing a short-­lived ideological presence in Firdos Square. Revealed in April 2002 to a large crowd in honor of Hussein’s sixty-­fifth birthday, only one year later Sharif’s sledgehammer, US forces, and angry Iraqi citizens’ shoes were pummeling it. The monument became an antimonument in the attacks on both the physical statue and the embodied memory of Hussein’s reign.41 As these very different examples show—girls having a laugh by writing in concrete, an angry man attacking a monument with a sledgehammer, an invading nation with overwhelming firepower taking down a statue— concrete is not impenetrable. Its surface breaks down in accordance to the degree of force upon it. To chip away at the security of concrete is to cut away at both the state and the national memories that justify its reign. Moreover, concrete can be transformed; the violent memories contained within the wall can be altered. For example, the artist collective HAD’s Silence, created in the aftermath of the ethnic cleansing in Visoko, Bosnia and Herzegovina, is a self-­described “wall cut art.” This particular form of street art uses a technique that cuts into a wall’s surface, “where the relations between the parts that remain and the removed parts create a relief surface.” In Silence, breaking apart the surface creates the images of some of the 8,372 Bosnian victims who met violent death during the conflict. The walls containing the bullets that killed individuals now contain visible images of their victims. As Iliana Babic, a resident of Visoko stated, “With every blow of the hammer into the wall, a piece of the past is removed to reveal the future.”42 For Babic, by physically removing parts of the wall, the future can become a reality. The HAD collective created a wall that intertwines past and future in a memorial of a nation that is still struggling to come to grips with both. What these examples demonstrate is that in a conflict, the physical and symbolic power of a wall may work against itself; the wall itself offers a space of resistance that calls into question the power and stability of the wall (and the state in which it was erected). Not all types of resistance are similar, but each illustrates that, far from impenetrable, walls can be physically and ideologically transformed. Walls, after all, can crumble, and in the debris, the pieces can become weapons of the oppressed.43 Walls, despite their seemingly permanence, are in a constant state of being re-­formed, even after their mixture hardens.

Walls, Streets, and Public Spaces : 37

streets If walls in conflict areas are in constant flux, or as Georges Perec’s epigraph to this chapter shows, when the walls of one’s own home are no longer knowable, privacy becomes a fiction. If a knock on the door can lead potentially to that door’s smashing in if it is not immediately answered, then walls, as embodiments of private space, are no longer viable. In conflict zones, walls and streets are part of the same plane and are extensions of each other.44 If the inside is always potentially outside, then people who do not have power to claim the private arena must make use of the public one. Tim Cresswell poetically states that “the street is a site of rhythmic geographies.”45 As more people take to the streets, especially during moments of conflict, the rhythm creates unexpected melodies. Asef Bayat, in his examination of the contemporary “Arab Street,” argues that the city is “ ‘inside-­out,’ where a massive number of inhabitants become compelled by the poverty and dispossession to operate, subsist, socialize, and simply live a life in public spaces. Here the outdoor spaces (back alleys, public parks, squares, and the main streets) serve as indispensable assets in the economic livelihood and social/cultural reproduction of a vast segment of the urban population, and, consequently, as fertile ground for the expression of street politics.”46 Walls lose their ability to keep people safe inside; the street, then, becomes fertile ground for political expression as displaced peoples join together. In conflict areas, people, already on the streets, are updating Henri Lefebvre’s call for a “right to the city,” a popular slogan that found an expression in the Situationists’ drifting. Streets become locations for encounters, liminal spaces within a lived geography as people gather, meeting in unplanned encounters. For marginalized citizens in conflict areas, the street, as Bayat contends, “becomes the ultimate arena to communicate discontent.”47 This relationship between the individual and the city has echoes of the Situationists’ manifestos, as they saw revolutionary potential in experimentation and play within the city landscape.48 Situationists wanted, as Guy Debord urged, to “reinvent everything each day.”49 This reinvention included people’s relationship to the city and public space. For Situationists—as well as for many graffiti writers—this informal play, though fun, was combative. Games involve formal and informal rules, but much play exists in an anarchic state, based not on goals but on experience. Situationists passionately argued for “unmechanized and nonalienating,” unchecked movements throughout the city.50 The Belgian writer Raoul Vaneigem argues in The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967) that anarchic drifting involves wandering around the city,

38 : Chap ter One

visualizing space in a new light. He is clear about what is at stake with this type of “play”: “For a time we occupied the enemy’s territory; through the power of our imagination we transformed the thieves’ den into a fantastic funfair; into a sunny pleasure dome, where the most amazing adventures would, for the first time, be really lived.”51 Viewing the simple act of walking through the city as occupying enemy territory places Vaneigem as an intruder; he is attempting to regain from the “thieves” what has been stolen from him. That loss is both physical and emotional and needs to be actively combated. For Debord, to create “moments of life concretely, deliberately, and freely” would happen only if one were able to view the built environment as a realm of “psychogeography”; one could re-­create the city by constructing specific events on the basis of an individual’s emotions and behaviors. It’s play, for sure, but as Vaneigem’s phrasing explains, this drifting through the city’s “combative” streets threatens the hegemonic status quo of city life. Graffiti writers drifting through the city, tagging mailboxes, walls, and signposts as they move in and out of neighborhoods, are a living expression of Situationist desire.52 This combative relationship between the individual and the city, for many non-­Western contemporary theorists, has only deepened in recent years. For the cultural geographer Edward Soja, contemporary cities are “sadistic environments” in which the city’s design is not based on utopian ideals but is influenced primarily upon fear.53 There is a distrust of a city’s own citizens; laws and architecture are intimately entangled to keep them in check. For example, the Egyptian sociologist Mona Abaza describes “planned communities” in the Middle East, describing how these “new cities in the desert mainly consist of walled, gated communities, landscaped compounds and condominiums, connected by highways that are easily accessible to Carrefour mega stores.”54 Much like Jane Jacobs’s indictment of the “death” of the American city in the 1960s, Abaza pinpoints the creation of new suburban neighborhoods that literally wall off those who do not “belong” as an architecturally designed fearful response to the city’s working class. Separation is physically and psychologically built into the environment. The city itself becomes an enclave of smaller border walls, keeping people estranged from each other. The built environment, as I have sketched out, is under competing pressures to be experienced in various ways. For state urban planners, designs to separate or siphon off disruptive actions that emanate from the street are paramount, as the state must regulate space to implement national security. When Napoleon III tasked Baron Haussmann to lead a complete reorganization of Paris’s public sphere in 1853—its boulevards, streets, parks, and public areas—Haussmann described himself as a “sur-

Walls, Streets, and Public Spaces : 39

geon” needing to operate on the body of the city, cutting out the “diseased” parts and performing a type of architectural bypass on the streets’ clogged arteries. Walter Benjamin, offering a rebuke of Paris’s reconstruction, however, saw Haussmann not as an idealistic surgeon but as a clear-­ eyed state manager whose job was to “secure the city against civil war.”55 In the nineteenth century, streets were designed not for chance encounters but for unimpeded movement.56 This fear of the unruly poor by city planners continues into the present: David Harvey writes how infrastructure built in the post-­1960s controls the working class: “The reengineering of inner cities in the United States in the wake of the urban uprisings of the 1960s just happened to create major physical highway barriers— moats, in effect—between the citadels of high-­value downtown property and impoverished inner-­city neighborhoods.”57 Streets, in other words, keep a white affluent “us” from a poor working-­class racialized “them.” Like border walls on national boundaries, internal infrastructure helps define the right of people’s access to the city and, importantly, to other citizens. Cities attempt to create flows of traffic along streets so individuals can move with great speed and determination; chaotic drifting and chance encounters are limited. If Haussmann’s plans were intended to stave off civil war, in contemporary conflicts his well-­copied designs (like Loos’s white walls) were unsuccessful. The streets have become spaces that citizens use as platforms to call out their leaders. In Rebel Cities, Harvey, echoing Henri Lefebvre, declares a need for citizens to “claim the right to the cities.”58 By using the term rights to demand access to the streets, Harvey, along with Lefebvre and the Situationists, is interested in the physical space of the streets and in their representational value. Conflicts take shape in the streets as people organize insurrection against those who hold power. The protester, then, participates in the construction of the material street itself; the breaking apart of the sidewalk to gather weapons and the writing of demands on the walls create tactical subversions of state power. In 2011, for example, the streets leading into Tahrir Square offered for protesters tactical possibilities as well as physical obstacles. Mohamed Mahmoud Street is a large artery into the heart of Tahrir Square, and demonstrators took to this street in massive numbers. Graffiti lined the streets from the beginning of the protests against Hosni Mubarak through the overthrow of the democratically elected president and Muslim Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi through the first years of General Abdel Fattah el-­Sisi’s presidency. Ammar Abo Bakr, a professor at Luxor University of Fine Arts who often coordinated the large painting events on this street, spoke to me in Luxor about how that street itself

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is a sacred space for the people, the lifeblood of the revolution. For him, Mohamed Mahmoud’s graffiti represents and embodies the revolution, needing to be consistently maintained and reproduced. This same street, though, became “the graveyard of the revolution,” according to Soraya Morayef, a reporter and blogger who was one of the first to report on Cairo’s large graffiti scene. She details how armed forces were able to strategically manipulate the pathways to Mohamed Mahmoud Street and corner protesters in one particular location (this is discussed more fully in chapter 2). For Morayef, the same streets that were a magnet for graffiti writers and protesters were strategically used against them, causing numerous permanent injuries and fatalities.59 Both police and protesters manipulated this street, both using it to fit their own needs. When analyzing a street’s immaterial life and its unstable symbolic value, the physical street must anchor these discussions.

public sphere Hegemonic balances of state power are constantly tipping in conflict areas as graffiti interacts within the public sphere. Jürgen Habermas’s theories are often the starting point for discussion when analyzing the public sphere’s democratic space. Although his ideas on this subject are more nuanced than his detractors give him credit for, Habermas saw a great divide between the state and the individual. For him, logic wins out against authoritarian rule. He imagined the public sphere as a space where individuals create consensus built on rational, clear arguments tying “the people” together; individual desires are subsumed into arguments for the good of the whole. Self-­interest is ideally minimized as the group builds toward a rational consensus. This conversation happens in the public sphere—in squares and parks, markets and outside cafés. Consensus takes place, then, in the streets. This bourgeois reinvention of the Greek polis is based on a type of universal liberalism—free individuals making rational choices. In Greek society, though, that public was select, with only specific “free” individuals viewed as “capable of political speech for the common good, not just self-­ interest.” Those in secure positions, therefore, spoke for all. The street was a place of calm, rational discourse, not one born in the midst of conflict. This idealized liberal view of the democratic space is based on a Kantian understanding of consensus as a dispassionate logic. Democracy as the good of “the people” suggests a lack of plurality, a uniformity focusing on those in the center while ignoring the margins.60 Chantal Mouffe, an “agnostic” Marxist, bluntly takes on Habermas and his view of consensus democracy. For Mouffe, to base democracy on individuals ignoring

Walls, Streets, and Public Spaces : 41

their own self-­interests is naïve idealism. For progressive radical thought to take place, Mouffe argues, consensus is not productive; rather, antagonisms will lead the way.61 Mouffe disagrees with the conceptual liberal-­democratic model of the Habermasian public sphere because “consensus without exclusion” is theoretically and practically impossible and, at best, a utopian dream. Rather than having an ideal national body, Mouffe argues for numerous “agnostic” political bodies. Mouffe contends that an actual democratic process is “dissensus,” or the confrontation between opposing ideologies. In conflict areas, public space is an agnostic space, a battle among competing political desires that results in an altered hegemonic space. Habermas’s rational conversation in the piazza is quite different from Mouffe’s pitched battle in the square. Mouffe’s view of the public sphere is not a pluralistic space where individuals can see quarrels from multiple viewpoints. Instead, Mouffe contends, citizens with varying perspectives need to mark out particular agnostic spaces, creating ruptures in the process. Antagonisms, for Mouffe, are a political necessity.62 In Habermas’s view, the public sphere is filled with rational, independent thinkers. Mouffe asserts, though, that “we are now witnessing the conflation of public spaces with the modes of consumption rather than participation, where consumption becomes the main form of social communication.”63 Habermas’s liberal ideal slides easily into a neoliberal logic in which capitalist consumption has appropriated production in the public sphere. Mouffe argues instead for counterpublics; smaller spaces where the goal is not a large consensus but the expression of self-­ interested subjectivities. In Mouffe’s view, we are not scripted ideologues sacrificing for the good of the group but fragmented individuals acting on our desires. This fragmentation, according to Simon Sheikh, is not a simple “pluralistic celebration” (and branding) of cultural diversity; rather, it acts as “oppositional radical difference.”64 Mouffe argues that dissensus will help create agnostic spaces that are alternative to the capitalistic modes of production, a way to break from the cycle of “essentialist identities of nationalist, religious or ethnic type[s]” that repeat cycles of violence. Instead, antagonisms offer new ways to collectivize.65 One way to appreciate conflict graffiti’s subversive performance is to understand it as pushed and pulled between Habermasian consensus building and Mouffe’s antagonism. As people come together on the streets, persuasion and surveillance bring consensus. But graffiti acts more freely, antagonistically placing contrary desires into the public sphere. During the 2011 demonstrations in Egypt, for example, some graffiti was undoubtedly consensus building, trying to reach out to a shared understanding of a unified Egypt. Nationalistic images of pharaohs and

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Tahrir Spirit lion, Cairo. Photo by John Lennon.

lions abounded; these images spoke of a country uniting behind a shared identity. Other graffiti in Tahrir Square pointed to individual political desires. For example, in the “No to sexual harassment” graffiti by Mira Shihadeh and Zeft, a female figure holds a can as a weapon to spray harassers away (plate 2). As Shihadeh explained to me in her apartment in Cairo, her graffiti was not a call for a united Egypt, but a feminist yell from the margins

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Classic Egyptian design graffiti. Mural by Ala Awad. Photo by John Lennon.

that women be at the center of the historic political upheaval.66 During the protests, women were sexually harassed by armed forces as well as by some of the protesters, and Shihadeh’s graffiti spotlights gender oppression within the larger revolutionary moment. Moving the focus from revolutionary protests in Cairo, Egypt, to the desperate, angry pleas of those suffering from Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in New Orleans, Louisiana, a similar push and pull can be recognized. In the Crescent City, some post-­Katrina graffiti was consensus building, attempting to highlight a homogeneous American identity (and therefore a city that should not be abandoned by the state). Other graffiti spoke directly to individual political wants and desires, focusing specifically on racial and economic divestment by local and state governments. In the following chapters, I focus on how the theoretical tensions of these two political philosophies are experienced in the public sphere of conflict zones across the globe. An important thread to follow when exploring this tension is how the public sphere is defined. Vito Acconci, the sculptor, architect, and performance artist, argues that there are two types of public spheres. One exists in a place where the state allows individuals to gather. The other is created by the very fact that the people are not given the right to assemble—a place “made public by force.”67 “Unknowable” walls lead men and

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women to the streets, where they converge upon a public square in massive numbers. For Acconci, these are spaces people can make “free.” His views of the square, or the piazza, “is [as] a vast multidirectional space” where “people are dots sprinkled across the floor; one dot slides into another and slips past another to continue” its own trajectory.68 Acconci’s view of democracy is very different from Habermas’s. Acconci believes democracy is built on unintentional interactions; Habermas believes in rational, deliberate, consensus-­building democracy. Acconci’s view of street democracy places great importance on haphazard, free-­ form antagonistic playfulness, echoing the Situationists’ drifting and Bor­den’s skateboarders. In contrast to Mouffe’s view, however, the movements are based not on antagonisms but on randomness. Leaders are unnecessary in Acconci’s view; rather, small groups within the space of the square meet and bounce off one another. These “clusters” do not have agreed-­on rules or dogmatic messages. People talk and listen because they wish to, and each individual is present as a fulfillment of an individual desire. As more people join a particular cluster, for this space to remain a democratic space, in Acconci’s view, they must break up, with individuals flying out in random directions. If these clusters join together and solidify, they form a group that, even though there are positive political possibilities that may emerge, cannot, for Acconci, be described as a free democratic space. Acconci argues that a “true democracy” is like a nonmonogamous relationship; these movements in the public sphere cannot be a marriage in which the greater good of the institution subsumes individual desires— two individuals joining to become one—rather, desires must be allowed to express themselves multidirectionally. These random mergers and uncouplings of bodies in the public sphere allow for an emergence of new ideas. Acconci’s sexualization of public space is certainly gendered, problematic, and doctrinaire in the rigidness of his idealism. Some of the graffiti writers and artists I spoke to and discuss in this book, however, agree that democratic consensus leads to party politics and a consequential reestablishment of the status quo. They adamantly oppose political parties and shun official political organizations, or, in some cases, even other graffiti writers. For them, there needs to be a consistent dissensus in the streets to antagonize and disrupt the machinations of the state. They “misuse” public space, forcing it to become a free-­flowing arena to communicate all levels of discontent, even if it is contrary to a larger, unified oppositional stance. One cannot, though, build an enduring social movement around Acconci’s theories of democracy. Likewise, a stable political movement will not form around conflict graffiti. Taken at face value, a politics cele-

Walls, Streets, and Public Spaces : 45

brating randomness and chaos could be, as Ivan Krastev writes in Democracy Disrupted, “a praxis with no theory.” These “leaderless” protests are political “performances” that show an aversion to elected officials, embracing mass demonstrations that explode in spectacular fashion before quickly disappearing. But unlike Acconci, who celebrates the chaotic within these random meetings, Krastev finds the base for these leaderless protests to be the middle class, who, despite the spectacular performances, “remains instinctively averse to disorder. Its members can play at revolution, but they cannot tolerate chaos.”69 Without a strong belief in electoral politics, Krastev argues that the demonstrators’ play will lead not to a democratic revolution but to authoritarian rule: “The democracy of tomorrow—being born today on the streets of the world’s greatest cities—will be a democracy of rejection.”70 If Acconci forms one leg of a triangle—with Mouffe and Habermas at the others—graffiti writers are in the middle, sometimes heading toward one angle before being pulled to another. As conflict happens, the public sphere is unstable, transforming in direct relation to how those in the streets are using it. What conflict graffiti shows us, when we read it as a dialectic among itself, bodies in the streets, and the built environment, are the messy politics involved in expressing individual desire. There is often no consensus or subsuming of individual will; graffiti are physical expressions of political desire outlining a particular gendered, racial, class-­based position in the midst of a protest. Disorder rules, and although the desires sometimes coalesce, a randomness is central to the expression of graffiti. There are uniting threads holding individual acts of graffiti together, but they are loose and often easily unbraided. Graffiti are born in the public sphere, an aesthetic spatial-­temporal practice. Despite being place based, though, they are distributed through various mediums, often in competing ways. When we examine graffiti in areas of armed conflict, how do the writing and reading practices change? Do graffiti—and their symbolic power—have an aesthetic quality transferable across national boundaries, languages, and times? Do the graffiti of a particular conflict share a similar discourse that can be understood across conflicts? Like graffiti in contemporary cities throughout the world, war graffiti is ubiquitous, often observed, and very rarely theorized. War graffiti are not monolithic, instead involving numerous actors, various styles, and a plethora of intentions. To examine graffiti in areas of war is to begin to unravel the war’s presentation in unexpected ways. One example of this unraveling can be found in the graffiti on a culvert in Libya where Muammar Gaddafi was found hiding from men who would soon kill him.

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graffiti and war On October 11, 2011, Muammar Gaddafi was killed on the outskirts of Sirte, Libya. After the governing National Transitional Council forced him to flee Tripoli in August, Gaddafi sequestered himself among loyalists living in Sirte. When the city was besieged in October, Gaddafi, as part of a seventy-­five-­car convoy, fled the city. NATO forces intercepted them, and a US Predator drone, flown by a commander in Las Vegas, destroyed part of the motorcade.71 Taking heavy fire, Gaddafi and some of his bodyguards hid in a culvert west of the city. Video of his capture show the disoriented, badly injured Libyan dictator paraded in front of the National Transitional Council shortly before his death. Two particular photos frame my discussion of graffiti and war. The first is a close-­up of the mouths of the two concrete tunnels. Lying in front of the right tunnel is a dead man; in the shadow his leg is pinned backward at an awkward angle under his mangled body; in the sunlight, his face is turned to the side. In front of the left tunnel, a man in jeans, sandals, and a flak jacket is bent over at the waist, his machine gun in one hand held tight against his leg as he stares intently into the dark tunnel. The ground is littered with debris, and above the tunnel are numerous feet, their bodies cut off from the frame of the photo. The tunnel entrances are centered in the photograph, marked by blue graffiti in Arabic: “This is the place of Gaddafi, the rat . . . God is the greatest.”72 The second photo is a wide-­angle shot taken from the left side of the tunnel, expanding the previous photo’s view, revealing various vehicles underneath road lights, a few trees, and buildings in the far distance. Large groups of men, a few wearing uniforms but most in more casual attire, stare toward the tunnels. The dead man is still present, although hidden from view by a cloud of dust that had been kicked up. The photographs are similar except for one major difference: in the second photo, a solider, half crouched, is writing graffiti. What is written is hidden from view, but we see the act of writing. These photos, credited to the French photographer Philippe Desmazes, were uploaded to the internet and shared among numerous news outlets that reported on the Libyan leader’s death.73 What I find fascinating about the second photo is that the image captures the actual act of writing war graffiti, something uncommon in the numerous photos I have examined. When viewing photos of war zones, graffiti regularly appears in the background. For example, there are numerous photographs of the battle for Sirte in the days leading to Gaddafi’s death. Most show Libyan soldiers firing weapons, spent bullet cases surrounding their feet; the city is devastated, homes and buildings, often

Walls, Streets, and Public Spaces : 47

Tunnel near Sirte 1, Libya. Photo by Philippe Desmazes/Getty.

Tunnel near Sirte 2, Libya. Photo by Philippe Desmazes/Getty.

with pointed anti-­Gaddafi statements, are badly damaged. But the people who wrote these words are unknown—are they soldiers? Civilians? What would be the motivation for writing graffiti in areas of war? As automatic fire echoes off damaged buildings and blood coagulates in the street, why would anyone take out a spray can?

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What is significant when examining the two photos mentioned above is the increase in graffiti on the tunnel entrances. The first graffito is soon joined by others, and then more, until the exterior walls are covered. In the still frame of this second extraordinary photo, however, we see the writer. He is a few feet from the dead man, but all eyes are on him as he bends to write his words on the tunnel’s entrance. As one of the few men in regulation fatigues, did this soldier have the privilege of writing a statement? While unanswerable, we do know that the man holding the spray can recognized the importance of this moment and, through graffiti, commented on and commemorated the moment. From the honored position of a writer, this man marked this significant moment in Libyan history. Like most dictators, propagandist images of Gaddafi were widespread, and banners, statues, and murals of the Libyan leader were plentiful throughout his rule. Before 2011, though, anti-­Gaddafi political graffiti were rare and quickly vanished from walls. Once the war started, though, an explosion of unflattering anti-­regime graffiti abounded.74 Soumiea Abushagur shows a plethora of graffiti styles in The Art of Uprising, her photo essay documenting Libyan conflict graffiti; a common theme in the book in rebel-­held areas is ridicule of the ruler. Citizens could not publicly contradict Gaddafi before 2011, but during the revolt, public images and writing made vicious fun of him. The graffiti was often grand and pictorial in metropolitan areas such as Tripoli; in smaller cities like Gharyan, it was mostly direct, economical writing, much like that of the soldier who wrote on the culvert’s walls.75 Abushagur’s photos illustrates the outpouring of messages sprayed across cities and towns throughout Libya, visualizing citizens’ political desire. The dictator’s propaganda machine, a monument to his rule, was quickly replaced by his country’s citizens’ own public commentary on the walls of houses, businesses, and streets. While Abushagur’s book captures the ephemeral graffiti artifacts of this political desire of the unknown men and women, the above-­discussed photo of the soldier writing on the culvert walls captures this moment of a man publicly writing as it intersects with the significant historical moment in a nation’s history. This man’s graffiti on the culvert near where Gaddafi was killed dialogues with the graffiti found throughout the cities and towns of Libya. This particular graffiti, in one of the last bastions of support for the former dictator, announces an epoch. Gaddafi’s death ended a particular era in Libyan politics, and scrawling an anti-­regime graffito on the tunnel hideout of the once-­powerful dictator marked the nation’s significant pivot to a new era. The impact of war graffiti as an artifact is beginning to be taken seriously by government officials and scholars. In 2004, for example, English

Walls, Streets, and Public Spaces : 49

Heritage, the British government’s statutory adviser on archeology, conservation, and management, offered guidelines on the significance, conservation, and supervision of military graffiti. They offer a multistep process of evaluation and preservation, including photographing the graffiti from six basic viewpoints.76 In the United States, there is also a focus on preserving war graffiti as historical artifact, with scholars reading graffiti to understand soldiers’ motivations. Katherine Reed, in examining US Civil War graffiti, argues that both Union and Confederate soldiers wrote graffiti to connect with their fellow soldiers and to communicate and harass soldiers on the other side.77 As battles raged and armies captured and recaptured land, soldiers wrote graffiti, knowing that the other side would probably read it at a future date. In 1862, Confederate soldiers graffitied Virginia’s historical Falls Church; when Union soldiers recaptured it and saw rebel names, they took great offense at the desecration. In another example, an image in Harpers Ferry of a lynched Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, was drawn on a doorway. A more imaginative soldier cursed Davis by reimagining the Bible’s Job story, showing Davis being eaten by a shark, then swallowed by a whale, which then swam to hell.78 Graffiti in war is now understood as both a historical and a cultural artifact, and there are concentrated efforts in the United States to archive it, including the US soldier’s war graffiti of World War I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Some governments attempt to preserve the original graffiti as historical artifacts. Other state-­sponsored groups are restoring conflict graffiti as overt political propaganda. For example, in 1948, on a roadside gas station near Jerusalem, an Israeli soldier wrote the graffiti “Palmach Baruch Jamili P.T. 1948!” The Palmach was a Jewish military force, and Baruch Jamili, the soldier who wrote the graffiti, sprayed the initials “P.T.” to stand in for his hometown, Petah Tikvah.79 The graffiti survived for thirty-­ six years, even inspiring a popular song, until Israel’s national water company, which owned the station, erased it. In 2011, though, to commemorate independence, the graffiti was restored. Israel’s cabinet secretary at the time, Zvi Hauser, stated, “We are happy to restore a historical icon that made its way into Israeli culture and sums up in one short sentence an entire period and a generation to which we owe the founding of the country.” For Hauser, this soldier’s gas station graffiti became an “icon” for his country, containing a generation’s political desire.80 War graffiti, though, is not only being cataloged and restored for historical purposes; it also is actively used by the military in current campaigns. Modern armies understand the importance of these visual markers and the working roles they play in a conflict zone. The US Army, for example, employs “specialist graffiti squads” as a type of counterintelligence: sol-

50 : Chap ter One

diers cross out or change anti-­coalition graffiti to confuse or create conflict. Colonel Ralph Baker, who led a US combat team during the Iraq War, stated that he and his men read anti-­coalition graffiti to understand the range of sentiment against the occupying forces and to gauge possible insurgent activity. Elsewhere, when participating in missions in Palestinian homes, Israeli soldiers have used graffiti to mark their pathways, signaling to fellow soldiers a way through the maze of rooms and streets—one that leaves their pro-­Israeli sentiments on Palestinians’ walls.81 As these examples show, war graffiti is not only, or simply, a passive sign of war activity. It is a tool weaponized in the conflict. Soldiers, though, are writing graffiti throughout their war experience from their training barracks in their home country, to the vehicles that take them to areas of conflict, to the latrines they build in foreign lands, to the walls in the homes and buildings within the territories they occupy, to the final statements in airports as they return home. Wars destroy lives, infrastructures, and environments; wars are also catalysts of cultural and national exchanges and appropriations. Invading soldiers bring the violent force of a nation onto another; they also bring their graffiti. This graffiti exchange is part of the overall violent cultural clash in a war zone. Art and Lee Beltrone, in their photo book Vietnam Graffiti, examine the General Nelson M. Walker, a troopship that shuttled soldiers to and from combat during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam wars. Their photos reveal the social and political work of graffiti as they illustrate each writer’s complicated desires and apprehensions. Depending on whether men were heading to or returning from war, their graffiti often spoke of their fear and trepidation or relief and celebration. Much of the graffiti displays only names and hometowns. These men, who were on a warship heading to a foreign land to fight and possibly die, rhetorically anchored their names to the particular geographic regions they were leaving. Writing a name and linking it to a particular place allows soldiers to solidify their national and local identity as they embark on fighting in a foreign land, possibly mitigating the stress of heading into the unknown. This need to anchor oneself to a home country bleeds into more overtly political graffiti, such as Herby Ellis’s message that was found on the ship: “VIEt NAM is No place for AN AMERICAN. But it’s a fight WE MUSt fight to KEEP OUR CouNtry And other COUNTRies fREE of communism. This is why you And I Both must fight. U.S. Marines Bound for Viet Nam January—‘1967’. Herby Ellis.”82 Ellis’s graffito reads as a statement of faith for engaging in the war, with the word must repeated twice, emphasizing that the individual soldiers “you” and “I” are an American “we” with a concise, clear mission in Viet-

Walls, Streets, and Public Spaces : 51

nam. In 1967, the antiwar movement was in full swing throughout the United States, and this graffito rejects the antiwar rhetoric and justifies the war, written by a man who did not know whether he would soon die. It leads one, though, to wonder why Ellis felt moved to emphatically lay out the case for the war to himself and fellow soldiers already on their way to Vietnam. Ellis’s graffito was a statement, but graffiti in a public space become conversations. For example, one soldier on the ship wrote, “Kilroy was here.” Another soldier responded, “Kilroy was queer.”83 This verbal interplay might be a joke, rhyming one-­upmanship between soldiers. The names and the dates of these comments are not inscribed, though, so although reading the graffiti is speculative, it raises pertinent questions. For example, is this a conversation between two soldiers from different wars—the first a soldier from World War II and the second one heading to Vietnam? In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien poignantly writes of angrily wanting to tell previous generations of soldiers to stop pressuring him to go to war, but he could only remain silent (“I was a coward. I went to the war”).84 Queering Kilroy, this “joke” graffiti could be read as a generational commentary, showing the frustration of fighting present wars with the vestiges and nostalgia of previous conflicts framing the fight. Then again, it could simply be a homophobic joke. War graffiti doesn’t always give clear answers, but it does raise significant questions. All these examples of war-­zone conflict graffiti—from a culvert in Libya to a US warship in the Pacific Ocean—show the roots and routes of graffiti as they speak to a particular historical moment but are read by an international audience. The graffiti discussed here are from soldiers’ perspectives, some of whom are writing their personal reactions to monumental moments, others consciously writing propaganda, still others working through their fears of death in foreign lands. Each of the examples, though, is a “one-­off,” an unrepeated graffito (even if restored in the Israeli example). Other conflict graffiti has become more iconic not for its uniqueness but for its ubiquity. In the final section of this chapter, I examine two iconic graffiti presented in multiple conflict zones to highlight how the images are employed for a wide range of ideological reasonings and cultural narratives. The first image has been written mostly by soldiers, the second mostly by citizens. Both graffiti, however, center on violence. The iconic US graffiti “Kilroy was here” is of a passive aggressor who colonizes space in foreign lands, marking Kilroy as an extension of the US military’s reach. The Palestinian icon Handala speaks of a victim of violence who perpetually seeks but can never regain his homeland. Both graffiti “witness,” but in starkly different ways.

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Engraving on the National World War II Memorial, Washington, DC. Photo by Luis Rubio.

kilroy and handala “Kilroy was here” was a popular statement among soldiers in the 1940s, with the phrase often accompanied by a particular doodle: a bald man (sometimes with a few strands of hair poking up from his head) with a long, rounded nose peeking over a wall he held onto with both hands. Clutching the wall, he looks directly at the reader. Neither menacing nor particularly active, the pudgy figure is seemingly just hanging around, looking. The US origins of the graffiti is attributed to James J. Kilroy of Halifax, Massachusetts. As described in the New York Times on December 24, 1946, Kilroy was an inspector at the Bethlehem Steel Company’s Quincy shipyard, examining the warships under construction. To prove to his superiors he was doing his job, he would write in yellow crayon “Kilroy was here” on the parts he inspected.85 The tag, with an additional drawing, began appearing not only on warships but in numerous unrelated places both inside and outside the shipyard. Soon Kilroy’s image appeared throughout military spaces in the United States and in war zones throughout Europe and Asia: the legend of Kilroy was born. Frequent rumors about Kilroy circulated in different areas of the world, including the story that Hitler, upon seeing the phrase in Germany, made an executive order to capture who he thought was a US spy. The Kilroy graffiti had wide appeal, perhaps because it was so simple and psychologically

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relevant, if an obvious lie: an ad in Life magazine for Canadian whiskey celebrating great American “liars” noted that World War II–­era servicemen were fond of claiming that “whatever beach-­head they stormed, they always found notices chalked up ahead of them, that ‘Kilroy was here.’”86 The American Transit Association authenticated James Kilroy as the “real” Kilroy (and he placed his prize for his artistic efforts—a trolley car— in his front yard). Even so, the origin story is suspect, with some claiming that the first Kilroy tag was found earlier, in 1937 or 1939.87 Regardless, Kilroy’s origins had Allied roots and metamorphosis: some suggest Kilroy is based on an Australian figure, Foo, whose image was chalked throughout Australian camps during World War I (predating Kilroy and thus an inspiration for him). This figure was then transformed into the popular “Foo was here” graffiti found throughout the battlegrounds of World War II. Mr. Chad is a similar British figure found throughout the war, mostly with an interchangeable expression bemoaning a specific form of war rationing, such as “Wot, no sugar?” Besides Foo and Chad, there were many other derivatives, transformations, and/or inspirations of the Kilroy figure, including Mr. Smoe, the Jeep, and Heffinger.88 Returning to the “queering” of “Kilroy was here” graffiti as found on the General Nelson M. Walker, the popular doodle underscores the dualism of conflict graffiti’s roots and routes. The soldiers who wrote the names and places where they lived while aboard the warship anchored themselves to their homes in the United States. When they traveled into conflict zones, they were no longer in familiar territory, and the potential for death was continuously present. The mythical importance of “Kilroy was here” is found, therefore, in the tense of the phrase—Kilroy was a soldier already present in whatever town, city, or beach the Allied soldiers were storming. An “everyman” soldier—the drawing was not of a muscular he-­man but a dumpy, bulbous-­nosed figure—Kilroy had already been, and apparently had safely left, wherever any US soldiers were heading. In the graffiti, his hands gripped onto the wall, and he stared directly at the viewer. Kilroy was doing the watching, he had made his mark, and he had already moved on. The phrase and image contain an unstoppable sense of momentum. No wonder there was a popular rumor that Stalin, while using a private bathroom during the Potsdam Conference in Germany in 1945 to negotiate the war’s end, was confused when he saw the Kilroy graffiti and wanted to know who the man was. Kilroy was everywhere—and by degree the US forces. The graffiti distribution (and its mythical stature) extended US reach both physically and symbolically. Kilroy is an American military icon that speaks of a collective shared identity among soldiers— perpetually present while simultaneously moving on to the next military spot. Kilroy highlighted the wide reach of the US military’s powerful in-

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fluence—Stalin couldn’t even relieve himself without Kilroy staring back at him. The graffiti speaks to the US military industrial complex’s expanded range. Simultaneously, “Kilroy was here” allows for a disavowal of the violence witnessed, experienced, and perpetrated by US soldiers. Kilroy is just doing his job, “hanging on” to walls, looking out before moving onward. He embodies not a violent soldier but a pudgy, complacent figure who is only (always) present. Kilroy is more passive than aggressive, more interested in looking than in participating. In this way, the American solider is not seen as a trained killer who, like Herby Ellis, is fighting the war with conviction and determination; rather, Kilroy graffiti allows for the violence enacted in war to take place outside the realm of the soldier who just happens to be there, watching.89 The violence might be happening, but he is not to be blamed. Another iconic conflict graffiti also acts as a witness, and it rivals Kilroy’s popularity and supersedes him in terms of distributed images. This witness, however, represents not an invading military force but the victim of that force. Naji al-­Ali’s iconic Handala, a ten-­year-­old refugee child, surfaces on walls in conflict areas throughout the Middle East. The poor child, with patched clothing, bare feet, and sparse, pointy hair, has his hands most often clasped behind him. The young boy is in a constant state of watchfulness, and yet we do not see his eyes doing the watching. We only see his back, turned on us. For many, Handala is the Palestinian conscience. Handala made his first appearance in the Kuwaiti newspaper al-­ Seyassah on July 13, 1969. His origin, however, dates to 1948, the day Palestinians describe as the Nakba (Day of Catastrophe) and that Israelis commemorate as their Independence Day. In the war with Israel, more than seven hundred thousand Palestinians fled or were forcibly removed from their homes. One of those fleeing refugees was Naji al-­Ali, who, at age ten, settled in the Lebanese Ain al-­Hilweh refugee camp. Handala represents that same ten-­year-­old boy who yearns to return to his homeland that is no longer his country. As al-­Ali states: “Handala was born ten years old, and he will always be ten years old. At that age, I left my homeland, and when he returns, Handala will still be ten, and then he will start growing up. The laws of nature do not apply to him. He is unique. Things will become normal again when the homeland returns.”90 Because of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, Handala is in a state of geopolitical arrested development, with natural laws bending as international ones go ignored, as he patiently waits for a time when he can return home. Although Handala’s age has been frozen in time, as an image, Handala has grown. Al-­Ali originally intended the boy to be a Palestinian child, but,

Walls, Streets, and Public Spaces : 55

as the cartoonist states, “when his consciousness developed, he acquired a national [Arab] horizon, then a global and human horizon.” For al-­Ali, Handala will begin maturing “when the homeland returns.”91 In this way, boy and homeland are twinning ideological imaginings. The conceptual land “returns” back to a physical one once the occupied Palestinian land is restored, allowing Palestine to mature into a functioning, independent nation. The occupation stymied the growth of Handala (and the Palestinian nation-­state) in such a way to prevent a boy—and a nation—from growing. Even though unable to mature, Handala has changed, with his “horizon” altering over time, from an observer to one who sometimes becomes involved in the conflict. Orayb Aref Najjar states that “the totality of [al-­Ali’s] work illustrates how political events morphed Palestinians from refugees to revolutionaries.”92 As the conflict transformed, specifically through two intifadas, so did the use of Handala in Palestinian resistance narratives and Arab pan-­nationalism. The universalizing of Handala has expanded the figure’s conceptual framework, and he broadly resonated in the Arab world and beyond. Handala appears on T-­shirts, coffee mugs, scarves, necklaces, and car details (all easily available from local vendors throughout the Middle East and on global platforms such as Amazon), rivaling the ubiquitous image of Che Guevara in his beret. Kilroy was first drawn in a military base; the figure of Handala began as a newspaper cartoon. Al-­Ali drew more than twelve thousand individual cartoons before he was murdered in London in 1987.93 In these cartoons, Handala is usually small and situated at the forefront, with his hands behind his back as he watches the action unfold before him (and before us readers). The subject matter of the cartoons depicts a wide variety of political violence: the contested Palestinian identity card, the lives of Palestinian families (as exemplified by watching the forlorn Az-­Zalama and his wife Fatima), the role of Christians in the conflict, the ineptitude of Arab regimes, or the US and Israeli collusion. During these observed injustices to Palestinian rights, Handala is present, a silent, bedraggled witness. Al-­Ali’s creation became an iconic figure, and consequently, Handala did not stay confined to the newspaper. Instead, he began appearing on the street, drawn by al-­Ali’s readers and admirers, to such an extent that Handala’s image is found throughout Palestine and the entire Middle East and into North Africa. Instead of belonging to one man, the image became a public entity, with others taking on the role of illustrator and spraying Handala onto border and city walls throughout the region. There are similarities between Handala and Kilroy graffiti. Both were adopted and redrawn by others in areas of conflict. Both figures witnessed violent conflicts. How they embody witnessing, however, is significantly different. In the political comics, Handala is a perpetual silent witness to

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the injustices against Palestinian people. Witnessing, in itself, as Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski state, “is subject to a constant struggle and is hence an inherently political practice.”94 The ethical political project of witnessing has been debated by Jean-­François Lyotard, Shoshana Felman, Giorgio Agamben, and Michael Foucault (among others). All these scholars show that witnessing often originates from a subordinated position. Handala is mute—as he witnesses the Palestinians’ struggle, he has no voice to offer protest. Handala is a silent presence who sees political violence firsthand. His defiance is that he does not look away. Kilroy, in contrast, was both staring out at the Allied forces and already on the move. Kilroy witnessed the violence with eyes open and carried on. Handala, though, is mostly drawn as a stationary witness, a victim with hands behind his back, rooted to a land torn from him. Handala’s embodiment dramatically changes when removed from the page and placed in a conflict environment. Walking along Israel’s Separation Wall, for example, I recognized the familiar figure of Handala from the back, just as when reading the comic. Appearing spatially and temporally on the wall, though, Handala no longer “sees” the injustice playing out in front of him. Instead, the inherent violence performed by the wall has consumed the sprayed figure of the ten-­year-­old boy. Handala no longer is able to “see” anything; with his back painted on the surface of the wall, he is embodied within the wall itself. Importantly, the distance from witnessing to victimization is physically elided, and the graffiti on the wall cements the victimization of Palestinians who cannot return to their homeland because of this physical barrier. By being drawn on the Separation Wall, Handala is a silent witness no longer, but, much like the Palestinian people who are cut off from their land, is bifurcated by the wall. Al-­Ali drew Handala (primarily) in the same way, rarely having Handala interfere with the scene playing out in front of him. When others have drawn Handala on the streets, however, they have reinterpreted the iconic figure. Often, the remixed graffiti makes the young boy either a passive victim or violent resister. For example, on the Separation Wall there is an image of the Statue of Liberty, with tears in her eye; she squats down to hold what seems to be Handala’s dead body (one of his arms dangles downward) (plate 3). The boy is no longer witnessing anything—his head is buried in the flowing clothes of a distraught Lady Liberty. It’s a visually powerful image, though a confusing one: the Statue of Liberty seems to cry over a Palestinian boy on a border wall built by a country in which the US subsidizes its military power and, under the Trump administration, ruled criticism of Israeli policy as anti-­Semitic.95 The gender and ideologi-

Walls, Streets, and Public Spaces : 57

Handala, Separation Wall, near Bethlehem. Photo by John Lennon.

cal politics are also fraught with competing readings. Does this graffiti speak to US guilt over Palestinian deaths? Or does it show the compassion of the American people toward victims? Regardless of the reading, in this image—as in most other images of Handala—the boy is a passive figure, presumably dead. Here he is no longer watching—the graffiti has made him purely a victim, wept over by a gendered figure of the United States, a player in Israeli-­Palestinian geopolitics. Violence has been en-

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acted upon Handala. The possible perpetrator’s guilt may be (somewhat) ambiguous in the graffiti, but the role Palestinians play is clear: they are the victims of the violence. Al-­Ali’s comic was primarily about witnessing, itself a political act. In this reinterpretation, the graffiti has moved from witnessing to victimhood. Other instances of reinterpreted Handala graffiti refuse to accept the role of victim. In a number of graffiti found in the Middle East and North Africa (and on products sold worldwide), Handala no longer clasps his hands behind his back but holds a sword aloft. The young boy becomes a defender of Palestinian rights who not only witnesses but actively resists. Instead of victims, we see Palestinian youth as fighters, linking Handala with kaffiyeh-­adorned Palestinian youths who throw rocks at Israeli soldiers. The spirit of this reinterpretation is in line with al-­Ali’s original Handala drawings. Although most of his comics throughout the years depicted the young boy with his arms behind his back, in a number of the daily comics al-­Ali also portrayed the young Handala actively resisting Israeli occupation. In a cartoon from March 1982, years before the First Intifada, for example, a young Palestinian mother, with one hand garnering a flower out of barbed wire, holds in her other hand a rock for Handala to throw.96 During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in July 1982, a defiant Handala, amid the ruins of a Lebanese house, faces the reader, both hands extended above his head, holding the Palestinian and Lebanese flags.97 In a cartoon from May 1983, the young Handala covers with a keffiyeh the bleeding, handcuffed, naked body of a female victim of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.98 Much of the Handala graffiti on the Separation Wall portrays this active fighter, showing images of Handala as vigorously resisting Israel. This type of graffiti is certainly different from the large celebratory graffiti displayed prominently on the Separation Wall of Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who was part of the 1969 hijacking of TWA Flight 840. However, taking this cartoon icon beloved by many throughout the region and reimagining him unites generations of Arab men and women in the struggle against Israeli colonization of their land. While activists offer their bodies in opposition to the wall on a daily basis (as captured by Miki Kratsman’s poignant film 70 Meters . . . White T-­Shirt that documents the violence over the course of a year in the Palestinian village of Nabi Salih),99 Handala graffiti visualizes a nation’s arrested development, since its land has been walled off from it. This figure that originated in a comic strip in 1969 has taken on a phalanx of meanings in the present day. But the way Handala is drawn—witness, victim, or resistance fighter—adds nuance and contextualization to this conflict.

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Leila Khaled, Separation Wall, Near Bethlehem. Photo by John Lennon.

Kilroy began as a way for an American soldier to identify his work on warships and then became a more expansive symbol of the American military, an everyday GI on the move in foreign lands, one step ahead of reinforcements. Handala was the creation of a man who experienced the Nakba personally and witnessed Israeli settlers colonize Palestinian land, but the image eventually grew into a larger symbol of Palestinian and Arab nationalism that is tactically employed in various political manifestations. Both are creations born of violence, although as Kilroy distances

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himself from the violence, Handala embodies it. In conflict zones, graffiti is rooted in the sociopolitical context of the area, and to read it allows for nuanced insight into the conflict. Equally important, though, is how various social actors reimagine and distribute this graffiti to re-­create their walls, streets, and public spaces.

2 : THE MESSY POLITICS OF CONFLICT GRAFFITI desire, graffiti, and assembling a revolution

tank vs bread-­biker In 2011, shortly after the euphoria of Hosni Mubarak’s ouster from the Egyptian presidency had diminished with the constriction of freedoms by the Supreme Council of the Military Forces (SCAF), graffiti writers painted walls throughout Cairo, offering their pointed commentary on the state of Egypt. Perhaps the most infamous of street artists in Egypt, Mohamed Fahmy, who goes by Ganzeer, sprayed a large image on a wall under the 6th October Bridge in the Zamalek neighborhood of the nation’s capital. The image is arresting: a young man on a bicycle, carrying on his head an enormously large tray of ayesh, a type of Egyptian bread, faces a military tank with its turret pointed directly at him (plate 4). This political piece emphasizes the divide between the youth movement that helped deliver the city from Mubarak’s rule and the generals who subsequently consolidated power; the youth, and the city they occupied, are in danger of being devastated. With echoes of “Tank Man,” the man who stood in front of tanks in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989, the solitary cyclist holds the nourishment for the larger, collective resistance that helped overthrow a dictator and continued its active protest against ruling military forces. A few hours after Ganzeer “finished” the piece, though, another street artist, Sad Panda, placed his iconic namesake on the wall behind the cyclist. The image of the slouching and portly panda, more cuddly than fierce, witnesses the standoff portrayed on the wall. The addition of the iconic panda speaks to the absurdity of the violence directed against the cyclist, humorously underlining that resistance— a deadly proposition—takes on multiple forms, including seemingly innocuous ones. The graffiti remained relatively untouched (though often photographed) until January 2012, when unknown artists added more images to the piece. Faceless, mask-­wearing protesters joined Sad Panda, and

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together they witnessed disturbing images of violence: victims, being crushed to death, gushing torrents of blood under and around the tank’s wheels. This addition, a reference to the death of Coptic Christians who were run over by military tanks on October 9, 2011, illustrates a consequence of standing up to those in power. But in a wall battle mirroring the larger political clashes in Cairo and Egypt, the piece was again altered in February 2012, and the conversation, by then an argument, continued. Identifying themselves as members of Badr Team 1, a group of SCAF loyalists destroyed the piece, whitewashing away the protesters, the bloody crushed victims, the cyclist, and Sad Panda. The only object remaining was the tank and an added inscription: “The army and the police and the people are one hand.”1 Posting a YouTube video of the defacement, members of Badr Team 1 called on other Egyptian youth to erase from their city’s walls the “anarchist” imagery. In retaliation, individuals who playfully called themselves the Mona Lisa Battalion drew a Dadaist flower with military leaders on its petals, as well as an obscene, snakelike general devouring fresh kill. The absurdist, dark humor returned to the piece, and the wall battle continued. This narrative of the transformation of Tank vs Bread-­Biker speaks to graffiti’s fluid nature. For Cairene street writers and artists, graffiti was one of many in a constellation of acts of resistance leading to Hosni Mubarak’s abdication of the presidency and the continued protests against SCAF. The city’s ordinary surfaces were illegally marked to display revolutionary potentiality by allowing the seemingly powerless rhetorical openings of engagement. Tank vs Bread-­Biker forced a conversation and battle on the street. Far from a monolithic discourse, graffiti created geographies of protest locally enacted but globally contextualized. The ephemeral discourse in this case needed to stay relevant and constantly reinvent itself; it did so by responding to particular conversations on specific walls throughout Cairo. Graffiti is part of the revolutionary conversation as it exerts its opinions, but more important, it is also a tangible display of the political complexity embodied by those inhabiting the streets. During the so-­called “awakening” in Egypt in 2011, graffiti was to go hand in hand with revolutionary change. As the journalist Ali Khaled emphatically stated: “But now, the shackles are off. A new era of hope has been ushered in across the region, one that could inspire an intellectual and cultural renaissance to match the political and social awakening.”2 Khaled enthusiastically embraced the widely photographed “new” art form as a visual example of a new era of Egyptian democracy, both forged on the street. It is this street politics—both in the occupying of space in Tahrir Square and in the occupying of space on public walls—that signaled the

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“hope” seeded in Egypt and the whole of the Middle East and North Africa in the second decade of the twenty-­first century. Saskia Sassen, in discussing the Middle East uprisings, imagines a newly birthed “global street” becoming a home for the powerless: “Urban space makes their powerlessness complex, and in that complexity lies the possibility of making the political, making the civic.”3 For Sassen, the term’s conceptual nature theoretically links the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa while acknowledging their varied, local, and separate political projects. As she makes clear, powerlessness is not an absolute condition, and these expressions of resistance—converging on a city square, writing on its walls—help form a fluid civic community that is materially based in specific city streets but conceptually connected to other streets throughout the region and the world. Using graffiti as a practice of resistance during Cairo’s street protests is not unique to the Egyptian revolution; as discussed throughout this book, in most political uprisings, walls are covered with messages.4 During the Arab Spring, graffiti were ever present in the streets of Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and other countries experiencing turbulent street protests.5 Each uprising is idiosyncratic, and each country’s graffiti reflect this uniqueness. Cairo’s walls are complicated sites of violence as graffiti writers with different political messages, both in content and tone, take to the same streets. Graffiti represents a circulation of knowledge in Cairo, transforming physical space into a contested site as the walls’ declarations reflect broader political discussions. A city landscape, as the sociologists Kim Dovey, Simon Wollan, and Ian Woodcock report, is a “dynamic assemblage of connections, of which the desire to write and erase graffiti are part,”6 and as Cairo uncomfortably settled into a post-­ Mubarak Egypt, who writes, how they write, and what will be left on the walls becomes a persistent battle of desires to produce (and erase) a particular set of knowledge. These sets of knowledge magnify the graffiti and street-­art scenes taking place on Cairene streets in 2011: they are both assemblages of competing desires. While the thousands of bodies crammed together in Tahrir Square purported to share a unified message, when we examine the graffiti left behind, we can see nuances in their thought. By reading these writings, we soon discover the heterogeneity of the messages and the contradictory ways that writers framed them. How we trace and understand these assemblages can reveal much of the nature of revolutionary desire that is the lifeblood of progressive social movements today attempting to upend seemingly stable political entities. Just as paint on walls can be transformed, erased, or left to the elements to deteriorate,

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revolutionary desire itself is not stable. This desire can be left to slowly starve or be violently stamped out without the proper nourishing assemblages. By analyzing some artists’ stated reasons for participating in the revolution of 2011, the graffiti populating Cairo’s streets and the region during this time, and the modes of production of the graffiti and street art that framed and branded the revolution, we can understand how conflict graffiti visualizes the messy politics of revolutionary desire. In the violent anti-­Mubarak protests, activists used graffiti to resist the Egyptian government and the military. Facing dire consequences, the protesters brought international attention to the revolution taking place in the Egyptian streets. My focus in this chapter is on Cairo’s graffiti and particularly the ways it articulates and interprets revolutionary desire. This passionate, though amorphous, desire is neither dogmatic nor uniform. During the demonstrations, secular feminists were protesting against Mubarak alongside members of the Muslim Brotherhood, occupying the space of the square together despite their intensely divergent individual political motivations and larger national goals. Likewise, the graffiti found on Cairo’s walls, doors, streets, tanks, lampposts, cars, and statues do not have an institutionalized message that can be easily co-­ opted by political parties. Graffiti allows anyone with paint or marker to place their desires for all to see. It is unsanctioned and unregulated, and, due to its illegality, graffiti has a spontaneous, rupturing quality. I will not focus on how hierarchical political parties attempting to unite Egyptian citizens under a particular ideological banner smooth over these ruptures; rather, I am interested in pausing before the graffiti and examining it as a tool that helped create the rift in the first place. Numerous graffiti waves have formed since Mohamed Morsi’s election on June 30, 2012, and even more so after the army deposed him on July 3, 2013—they continued to transform after president Abdel Fattah el-­Sisi’s election in 2014. For the purposes of this chapter, though, I specifically examine the graffiti during the eighteen-­day protest in 2011 and the subsequent months following Mubarak’s ouster and the reign of the SCAF-­ controlled government. Graffiti is a material yet ephemeral expression of desire that is placed in the public sphere. Most of the images discussed in this chapter have disappeared. They have been covered over by government employees, or, as Mona Abaza, a professor of sociology who has chronicled the evolving graffiti scene around the American University in Cairo, has termed them, “professional whiteners.”7 Social media, however, has allowed images of revolutionary graffiti to travel quickly from a particular wall in Cairo to a global audience, and this conflict graffiti is, therefore, both a local and a global phenomenon. This chapter analyzes some of graffiti’s mutations,

The Messy Politics of Conflict Graffiti : 65

examining a graffiti scene in Cairo as it follows the ebbs and flows of revolutionary desire. The so-­called Arab Spring has become synonymous with graffiti-­covered walls, but this chapter disrupts the myopic view that “revolutionary” graffiti is uniform, instead examining the kaleidoscope of textures and messages found on Cairo’s walls.

contextualizing cairo ’ s graffiti Over the course of eighteen days, from January 25 until February 11, 2011, six million Egyptians took to the streets, making the revolt the biggest pro-­democracy uprising in the history of the Arab world.8 The graffiti on the walls surrounding Tahrir Square, the epicenter of Egypt’s uprising, reflected this protest surge. This culturally central landmark has remnants of Egypt’s past alongside its present, including the Museum of Antiquities and the offices of the ruling National Party. For a country where 40 percent of people live on less than two dollars a day, and one-­fourth of the population is between eighteen and thirty years old, Mubarak, as he desperately tried to hold onto power, was faced with globally cognizant, mobile young people who placed their bodies in opposition to him as president who had ruled the country longer than all but three pharaohs and pashas in its six-­thousand-­year history.9 Willing to risk their lives as they rushed into Tahrir Square, many protesters captured their immediate experiences, filming themselves on their smartphones and uploading photos and videos to social media sites. The ubiquitous panoramic images of the protest shot from a long distance show the protesters as a collective. A more personal revolt, however, emerged on individual Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. One method some protesters used to fight Mubarak was graffiti. During the eighteen days, there were numerous violent skirmishes, and graffiti immediately territorialized the victories (and defeats). For example, when protesters won one particularly tough battle on Qasr al-­Nil Bridge, they immediately spray-­painted graffiti on the pedestal of the famous stone lions: “Game over, Mubarak.”10 Graffiti, according to the urban studies scholar Ella Chmielewska, can be read as a “specific history of protest, contestation, and subversion framed by the locality.”11 Graffiti forms a fluid geography of resistance during transformative times, and there is a direct materialist connection between writing on walls and inhabiting streets in protest. If, as the archeologists Bruno David and Meredith Wilson suggest, and as the above example illustrates, graffiti is a way of asserting one’s right to place and self-­determination, the occupying of the streets and the writing on its walls are certainly intertwined.12 These public spaces containing

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protesters’ blood were often the same spaces painted with the likenesses of the dead, giving a physical shape to the memory of the victims of violence. Graffiti, to use Jean Baudrillard’s classic definition of the term, was a “scream, an interjection . . . an insurrection and eruption in the urban landscape.”13 It was an interruption, therefore, in the life of Cairo, where streets stopped functioning in their original purpose and instead became placeholders for protesting bodies—with the walls holding the visual lexicon of their demands. The interrelationship between occupying walls with graffiti and protesters occupying Tahrir Square has a political lineage predating the Arab Spring. Cairo’s downtown area was built between 1863 and 1879 by Ismail Pasha as part of an ambitious city-­planning initiative with broad boulevards and public squares—perfect for large masses of people to gather. The most spectacular of these squares, called Midan Ismailia, had its name changed to Midan al-­Tahrir (Liberation Square) after the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, when Egypt moved from a constitutional monarchy to a republic. In recent history, this public space has been the location of various youth protests and demonstrations, including the 1972 student-­ led democracy movement and the 2006 two-­day sit-­in by activists and bloggers who wrote their political demands on the walls and streets.14 Contrary to many of the media reports published in 2011, there is a long history of various graffiti waves in Egypt. Scholars have effectively argued that describing the recent events in the Middle East as an Arab “awakening” is an insulting misnomer, pointing to numerous democratic movements in the region since the nineteenth century. Going back even farther, in the rock face of El Kanais, thirty-­four miles east of Edfu in the Wadi Mia and located near a temple founded by the nineteenth pharaoh, Seti I (fl. c. 1294–1279 BC), scholars have discovered three thousand years of carving, including Greek letters, Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions, Arabic and French expressions. Like the graffiti found in Cairo in 2011, these showed a mixture of style, language, and content.15 Similarly, Ahmed Nagi has argued that while there has been a focus on graffiti post–­ Arab Spring, there was a graffiti scene in Cairo, Alexandria, and other large cities before the revolution, one that flourished despite attempts by authorities to stop illegal politicized writing.16 As Mahmoud Aly, who has been writing wildstyle graffiti (a style first popularized in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s) in Cairo since 2008, states, “Of course there was a big graffiti scene but there wasn’t that mass media focus on the artistic pieces and if it was a political message the government will block it the next day, that’s why lots of people think there wasn’t any graffiti scene in Egypt before the revolution.”17 Graffiti exploded in 2011, but there were plenty of graffiti waves predating those revolutionary days.

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The ruling party was certainly aware of graffiti. During the 2006 demonstrations, for example, government officials erased graffiti from the walls and forcibly removed protesters from Tahrir Square. They proceeded to write new laws, install surveillance technologies on city streets, and deploy new strategies to control demonstrations. Rana Jarbou’s ongoing project 1001 Walls, a rich history of political graffiti in the Middle East and North Africa (and various governments’ ensuing responses to graffiti), predates the 2011 demonstrations, visually contradicting the idea that the Arab Spring birthed graffiti in the Middle East. So do the number of instances in which political graffiti writers were arrested in Egypt before the Tahrir Square protests. For example, in 2003 Mohamed Nada wrote on walls, “No to power inheritance.” He was promptly jailed, facing serious charges of “defamation of national leadership” (although he was not convicted).18 In 2009, five members of the April 6 Youth Movement— a collective formed in 2008 in the industrial town of El-­Mahalla El-­Kubra to support workers planning to strike for better working conditions and higher wages—were arrested for writing political graffiti. A year later, on February 17, 2010, Ahmad Maher and Amr Ali, two members of the April 6 Youth, were arrested for spraying political graffiti. Maher stated: “Our aim is not vandalism but rather posting messages on the streets in order to raise political awareness amongst the Egyptian people. We want to express our opinions openly where everybody can see them.”19 In the years following the 2011 revolution, as Sisi’s government gained a stronger foothold against Egyptian dissent, there has been a concentrated effort to control political graffiti through the whitewashing of walls. According to the Association of Freedom for Thought and Expression, since the revolution, at least twenty-­two street artists have been arrested, with other graffiti writers detained for a wide variety of crimes, including “environmental pollution.”20 In 2013, the interim minister of local development, Adel Labib, wanted to penalize all graffiti and street artists with four-­year jail times and fines of up to 100,000 Egyptian pounds (US$12,770).21 In 2014, Ammar Abo Bakr painted a mural on Mohamed Mahmoud Street memorializing Hisham Risk, a nineteen-­year-­ old graffiti artist and April 6 activist who went missing and was found dead under suspicious circumstances (plate 5).22 It is important to recognize that whether through fines, jail time, or bodily harm, those who write graffiti in Egypt—before 2011 or after—place themselves and their freedom at considerable risk. Despite the strategies developed to control the protest and its accompanying rhetoric, graffiti is a disembodied act that secretly forces itself onto city life: the unauthorized words accuse while the accusers are tactically invisible. When the city is in flux, graffiti, like the protesters in the

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Truck, “The End” graffiti, air travel ad, Cairo. Photo by Yasmine El Rashidi.

street, materially reappropriates public space. This occupation counteracts surveillance and erasure strategies. As the criminologists Mark Halsey and Ben Pederick state, writing on walls “disturbs, deterritorializes and therefore rejuvenates the city,”23 creating a social, dialectic relationship between the city and its citizens, with graffiti writers reconstituting the visual terrain for city inhabitants. Graffiti, therefore, produces for viewers a new relationship with the metropolis that is spatial and also globally informed. During the Tahrir Square occupation, “The End” was painted in English in large black letters on the side of a truck, scrawled over the Arabic words “Down with Mubarak.” The palimpsest of Arabic and English speaks to a larger audience than that of Tahrir Square; it is a rhetoric of protest meant to be dispersed past the city walls. To the upper right of the writing is an advertisement for air travel. Although certainly captured accidently, it is a visual reminder that city space is at once a physical location and a global entity: conflict graffiti images travel at the speed of a Twitter post and are easily accessible via YouTube, Instagram, and Flickr. Iman Mersal, an Egypt-­born poet living in Canada, wanted to feel the spirit of the revolution as it was taking place. Instead of reading traditional newspapers, she searched for images of her home on the internet, seeking out the graffiti-­covered walls. For Mersal, “From the early days of revolution onwards, the walls became us.”24 The graffiti-­covered walls— even from a distance of thousands of miles and an ocean in between—­ became the conduit to experience the revolution. These graffiti are indicative of the global street described by Saskia Sassen: there is an emergence of the powerless participating in civic

The Messy Politics of Conflict Graffiti : 69

action witnessed by a global audience. The graffiti painted on the side of a truck, Ganzeer’s piece under the 6th October Bridge, and the triumphant declarations on Qasr al-­Nil Bridge’s stone lions are all part of a visual narrative revealing the social construction of a city in upheaval. Bullets and blood become part of the walls’ materiality during conflict, changing the walls and infusing them with a new physical form and ideological identity. Likewise, political graffiti transforms a city’s structures, reconstituting the architecture to create for viewers a subjective perceptual relationship with the environment. The walls speak and enter into a collective conversation, expressing the plural identities and revolutionary desires of the people inhabiting the streets. This conversation, partially overheard, sometimes (mis)translated, and often contradictorily interpreted, connects people from all areas of the world. These conversations form the messy politics resulting from the always-­uneven implementation of revolutionary desire. A helpful way to think about Cairo’s graffiti during this revolutionary time is to apply the Deleuzian concept of assemblage, or the relationship among a collection of heterogeneous elements that express a particular character or essence. An assemblage cannot be discovered by exclusively examining the individual components; only after we understand what it can do, do we know what it is.25 As Chmielewska states, “Graffiti is an important cultural site for negotiating local identity,”26 and graffiti sprayed on Cairo’s walls was an expression of an individual’s revolutionary desire. But there is still linkage, as the eye—and mind—connects the graffiti together. Graffiti is not read in isolation, and as the eye moves from one graffito to another, this allows for an assemblage: the essence of the protest gets made, or is in the process of “becoming.” In this way, reading graffiti creates a “territory,” a place that is not fixed but is constantly being made and unmade, reterritorialized and deterritorialized.27 To assemble a fluid territory of conflict graffiti, I want to highlight a few of the nuanced components found on Cairo’s walls during the transitional months from pre-­Mubarak to post-­Mubarak Egypt, in order to articulate a more robust geography of revolutionary graffiti. Stopping in front of a particular graffito allows for discussion of specific walls and streets; examining the graffiti as relational allows for an assemblage of revolutionary graffiti to emerge. Ganzeer, Sad Panda, Aya Tarek, Hany Khaled, Ammar Abo Bakr, Ala Awad, Mira Shihadeh, Khadiga El-­Ghawas, and others who do not want to be named all spoke to me about their experiences of painting during the revolution. Their views on the revolution vary widely even as their aesthetic styles and political messages converge and diverge on the streets of Egypt. Some consider themselves political activists who use graffiti to further the revolutionary impulse; others do

70 : Chap ter two

not. Some have since fled Egypt to protect themselves; others continue to create art there to the present day. By reading these images together, we can assemble and read a more nuanced understanding of revolutionary desire.

ganzeer Over a cup of coffee in a gentrified section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Ganzeer told me a fable that he first learned from Alan Moore, the famous comic-­book writer. The story is of a powerful king who fears his scribe; it is the writer, rather than the regent, who shapes people’s view of the king and his reign, especially, as Ganzeer says with a smile, “if he had made jokes about this guy.” During this retelling, Ganzeer wants to make sure I understand his point: “That, for me, signifies the power of art and the role of art. It’s not about making huge metal poodles and putting them in the public square. It’s not about doing Campbell’s soup cans on a fucking print. That’s all bullshit.” For him the power of art—including street art—has the ability “to alter consciousness and affect people for years and years to come . . . it’s how the world will be shaped.”28 It is his earnest belief in the significant role of the artist in society that crystalizes Ganzeer’s conflict graffiti. Ganzeer is one of the most recognizable artists who gained notoriety during the Egyptian revolution. Shortly after the protests led to Mubarak’s abdication, the New York Times was proclaiming Egypt the new world capital of street art and Ganzeer as among its most prominent practitioners.29 On January 25, 2011, though, like most people in Egypt and around the world, Ganzeer was not aware of the imminence of Mubarak’s overthrow. He was at a friend’s apartment near Tahrir Square. It was National Police Day, an official holiday, so he knew there would be protests, but he wasn’t planning on attending. To his surprise, however, he saw on Twitter live feeds demonstrators heading toward the square. “The protests I’d been to before, it was on a corner or a particular place surrounded by riot police, and it’s not really going anywhere. But this was spontaneous,” he said. Ganzeer continued to follow along on social media, and when he realized the crowd was heading to the Ministry of Interior near his friend’s apartment, he says, “I figured, fuck this, I’m gonna head down.” Before leaving the apartment, Ganzeer picked up some spray paint. He says: “[I] felt like if something were to go down, a good idea is to leave a mark because the police will probably crack down, and then there will be no mention of any protest or anything in the papers. To leave a mark somewhere, then there’s proof that something happened there.”30

Plate 1 Tree on Separation Wall, Bethlehem. Photo by John Lennon.

Plate 2 Woman spraying sexual harassers away, Cairo. Graffiti by Mira Shihadeh and Zeft. Photo by John Lennon.

Plate 3 Statue of Liberty, Handala, Separation Wall, near Bethlehem. Photo by John Lennon.

Plate 4 Tank vs Bread-­Biker and Sad Panda, Zamalek, Cairo. Graffiti and photo by Ganzeer.

Plate 5 Hisham Risk, car, barbed wire, Cairo. Mural by Ammar Abo Bakr. Photo by John Lennon.

Plate 6 Mask of freedom, poster. Credit: Ganzeer.

Plate 7 Fairuz, Beirut. Graffiti by Yazan Halwani. Photo by John Lennon.

Plate 8 Boy, sheep, parts of perception mural, Cairo. Photo by eL Seed.

Plate 9 Mural on stone barricade, Sheikh Rihan Street, Cairo. Photo by Jonathan Rashad.

Plate 10 Borrando la frontera, Tijuana, Mexico. Mural by Ana Teresa Fernández. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.

Plate 11 “Flower Bouquet” mural, debris, Bani Hawat, Yemen. Mural and photo by Murad Subay.

Plate 12 Exhibit Be, abandoned apartment complex, New Orleans. Photo by John Lennon.

The Messy Politics of Conflict Graffiti : 71

When Ganzeer picked up the spray paint, he sensed the need to bear witness to the violence that he anticipated would befall him and his fellow marchers. The protest was a communal act of rebellion; so, too, the graffiti he would write. In the square, he climbed a billboard with an advertisement for Mubarak’s National Democratic Party—with white paint, he wrote “Down with Mubarak”—to the cheers of the increasingly swelling crowd.31 “So I spray-­painted on that [billboard] and spray-­painted different locations because I knew they would kick our asses. And that’s what happened,” he said. These marks were a visual representation of opposition to those in power, but unlike a tagger representing the “I” by repeatedly writing his or her own name, Ganzeer writes more expansively in the collective “our.” His “Down with Mubarak” graffiti was both a wish-­ statement and an acknowledgment of the men and women who would disappear, he believed, under swinging police batons. His white marks on the billboard would commemorate the fight, placing the chanting crowd’s slogan over the propagandist ads of the party they were determined to overthrow. Ganzeer’s graffiti was collective graffiti, witnessing and inscribing the desires of the protesters. It was not nuanced but rather a simple declaration of a protest that Ganzeer, at that point, had no reason to believe would be mentioned in the newspapers. Interestingly, even though he discovered the protest through Twitter and had followed along through live feeds, he felt it was important to leave a mark in the place where he was rightly convinced there would be violent repercussions. Although described by some as a virtual Facebook revolution, Ganzeer was adamant about the need to commemorate the place of the violence—the “realness” of the marks on the billboards would bear witness to the violence being born on their bodies.32 Ganzeer’s graffiti was not an artistic statement but a blunt tool to express a clear desire of those in the square, a memorial to the people who joined together to protest the Mubarak regime. Ganzeer’s impulse to spray paint was not unique, and during those eighteen days many other writers who did not associate themselves with a graffiti subculture also painted their desires to end Mubarak’s rule. A white-­haired man in a sweater vest wrote in Arabic, “Protesting until you leave” on an army vehicle. Another older man with whiskers on his tired face wrote, “Be careful guys” on a tank. A third middle-­aged protester wrote on a wall, “Leave, leave Mubarak.” On the Talaat Harb statue of the cofounder of the Egyptian Banque Misr, located at the intersection of Talaat Harb Street and Mohammed Sabri Abou Alam Street in downtown Cairo, there were numerous scrawled messages by anonymous protesters, some expressing their desire through humor: “News flash: Mubarak turns out to be a donkey, with our deepest regrets for donkeys.”

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“Mubarak Out” graffiti, wall, people walking, Cairo. Photo by Hossam el-­Hamalawy.

Others’ scrawls are more earnest and memorializing: “Statement no. 1 of the Freedom revolution: 28 January 2011. This square has witnessed a huge number of young people revolting for the sake of their country and their martyrs; it was soaked with the blood of the freedom martyrs. And so the tyrant and his aids [sic] have fallen at the hands of the youth of the free Egypt on the Friday of Anger.”33 These were the marks of protesters who had no interest in the graffiti subculture and were not professional artists like Ganzeer. Graffiti, for them, expressed their revolutionary desire. Many impulsively painted their desires on walls and streets as they faced a violent state response.

assembling a protest: graffiti during the tahrir square occupation From January 25 to February 11, 2011, Tahrir Square teemed with men, women, and children demanding Hosni Mubarak’s ouster. As Anna Agathangelou and Nevzat Soguk capture this moment: “The revolutions claimed the streets, resisting the police/military and saturating spaces with a collective effervescence to challenge ‘business as usual.’”34 Words as well as bodies inundated these physical spaces. People dug in and erected tents. They also pulled out their markers and spray cans that, according to the Egyptian poet Mersal, “presented a different sense of community and solidarity” in Tahrir Square, as walls and vehicles became tabulae rasae for their desires.35 The varied messages allowed the occu-

Man writing “Mubarak Leave” graffiti, Cairo. Photo by Hossam el-­Hamalawy.

“No to Mubarak the US client” graffiti on KFC store, Cairo. Photo by Hossam el-­Hamalawy.

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Graffiti, tank, Cairo. Photo by Rowan El Shimi.

piers to facilitate community identities and relationships as they stood in solidarity against Mubarak. These graffiti are relentlessly wordy, with messages scrawled on the city surfaces in both Arabic and English. It is a collective history, a language-­ centered (fractured) missive appropriating the street. As Dovey, Wollan, and Woodcock assert, “Graffiti, like the sense of place, is deeply ingrained without being deeply-­rooted as essence.”36 Graffiti are ephemeral, and yet the sheer ubiquity of the writing allows for a “taking of place” with its declarative presence. Crowds formed and reformed as individuals flowed into or were forced out of Tahrir Square, creating dynamic revolutionary assemblages. Reading the graffiti those people left behind creates new assemblages of the protest. Ganzeer drew a tank pointing its turret at a cyclist to articulate the overwhelming firepower the protesters were facing. In Tahrir Square, actual tanks were rearticulated not as weapons of war but as rhetorical spaces of resistance. When army tanks surrounding Tahrir Square became blank spaces for the community to write on, new territories of materialist protest formed; the graffiti visually represented “the people’s voice” to the collective body occupying the square.37 This inscribing was not just a semiotic exercise or a harmless stunt. As previously mentioned, numerous Coptic Christians lost their lives when similar tanks crushed them to death; the turrets, after all, were loaded with live ammunition. Graffiti was an affirmation of revolutionary desire in the face of death. As the military tank transformed into a blank slate, the walls spoke,

The Messy Politics of Conflict Graffiti : 75

and they did so polyphonically. During these eighteen days, the interrelations between occupying public space and revolutionary writing manifest physically. During this graffiti wave, therefore, graffiti were not just symbolic phenomena; they were deployed as weapons as well.

graffiti as weapon In retelling of what brought him to the January 25 street protests, Ganzeer explained the impetus to take spray paint from his friend’s apartment: “I don’t give a fuck about what the tool is. If you give me a rock, I’ll use it. I can scrape something out. It doesn’t matter. So she had spray paint, so I just took spray paint. It was that simple.”38 Ganzeer’s discussion of graffiti as a tool close at hand—no different from a rock—­underscores the very practical nature of conflict graffiti as a protest tool. It is not, however, a passive instrument. When scholars and artists allude to “art as a weapon,” they mostly mean this metaphorically. But spray paint, used in certain ways, can become an actual weapon of the marginalized to combat much superior forces. Graffiti and street art have often been discounted as merely art—pictures on a wall—that symbolically reflect revolutionary desire. Ganzeer thinks about this tool differently. The weaponizing of spray paint is noticeable in a twenty-­six-­page anonymous pamphlet the Guardian described as “slickly produced,” and quickly attributed to Ganzeer, who created it between January 25 and January 28.39 “Everyone was under the impression that Jan. 28 was gonna go down. We were coming to a boil. . . . So prior to Jan. 28, I felt, OK, I’m going to work pretty fast, do this thing. What do I feel is going to be useful information and put it out there and let people share,” he said. The leaflet is an impressive document consisting of tactical advice and stencils for reproducing and plastering throughout the city. But even though Ganzeer cautioned demonstrators to begin in a “peaceful manner,” he was expecting a fight, and his pamphlet showed protesters how to protect themselves during the takeover of Tahrir Square and state-­owned buildings. One section of the pamphlet, “Necessary Clothing and Accessories,” contains both images and advice for what protesters should wear (hooded jacket, thick rubber gloves, scarves, running shoes) and carry (a rose, a pot lid, and spray cans). The clothing is meant for protection: scarves and hooded jackets protect from tear gas, and gloves protect from burns. But other objects are meant for (re)actions: spray paint is necessary “so that if the authorities attack us, we can spray-­paint the visors of their helmets and the windshields of the armored trucks, blocking their vision and hindering their movement.” To make his point clear, in the pamphlet he drew a police-­armored truck and circled the surveillance cam-

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How to Revolt Intelligently pamphlet. Credit: Ganzeer.

eras and the windshield, indicating where protesters should spray-­paint to block the soldiers’ view. Another drawing is even more dramatic. Over an image of a hooded protester fighting against a baton-­wielding policeman in riot gear, Ganzeer states emphatically, “Hold Your Ground, Egyptian!” with the caption, “Block the truncheon with your shield as you’re spraying them in the face.” The paint used to create messages on walls, then, had become an actual weapon in the fight for political freedom. As’ad Abu Khalil, an Egyptian blogger who has written extensively on the changing political climate in Egypt, stated of the pamphlet in 2011: “It is most impressive and makes me more hopeful about change in Egypt.”40 When Ganzeer first grabbed spray paint as an afterthought on January 25, his “Down with Mubarak” graffiti bore witness. As he was making his leaflet in the days following, however, spray paint was a primary weapon in hand-­to-­hand combat against armed forces. Not meant to memorialize, spray paint protected Egyptians from state violence and produced its own reactionary violence. Graffiti are often used to visualize the demands of the marginalized, but here, spray paint blinds; it covers up window shields, visors, and cameras. Like the pot lid repurposed as a shield, spray paint is repurposed as a weapon of the weak to take on armored trucks and heavily armed riot police.41 Obviously, spray-­painting a police visor is different from painting Tank vs Bread-­Biker in Zamalak’s middle-­ class neighborhood. Both, however, are expressions of revolutionary

The Messy Politics of Conflict Graffiti : 77

desire that weaponize spray paint in different ways. While social media has been (over)emphasized in the Egyptian protests, low-­fi, do-­it-­yourself projects—graffiti or photocopied leaflets passed out by hand—were integral to the overall protests taking place during these eighteen days. To ignore these low-­fi expressions is to overlook some of the venting of revolutionary impulses on the streets. Ganzeer advocated for spray paint to be used as a direct weapon against the police. Likewise, in his art, graffiti is a violent tool of resistance. After Mubarak was ousted from office, Ganzeer continued his art attacks against the government and SCAF. As an organizer of “Mad Graffiti Weekend,” he created a do-­it-­yourself graffiti campaign designed to raise awareness of SCAF injustices. The event, which was held May 20–21, 2011, was initiated by Ganzeer, Ahmed Nadim, and Aida Elkashef, and it featured street art by Sad Panda, El Teneen, Adham Bakry, and Oxist.42 Although his graffiti were certainly confrontational, it was a sticker Ganzeer plastered around Cairo that led to his interrogation by the armed forces. On May 26, 2011, Ganzeer was putting up his now-­infamous sticker around the city; it reads: “New: Mask of Freedom. Salute from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to the loving sons of the nation. Now available for an unlimited period of time” (plate 6). The sticker was obviously a direct commentary on SCAF’s stranglehold of the country, but the image was arresting: a blindfolded nude, bald male from the chest up, with wings on either side of his head and a ball gag in his mouth. Observing Ganzeer place a sticker up on the wall, a group of citizens surrounded him, and a small scuffle ensued. The military picked him up, and Ganzeer was brought to military headquarters. Fortunately for him, news of his arrest immediately spread in social media. International as well as local media reported on his interrogation; in fact, the media’s focus on Egyptian graffiti and street art was crucial to his release. Ganzeer believes that his interrogators’ nonconfrontational treatment of him (“they offered me a Coke”) was because they didn’t think his actions were dangerous enough to warrant the attention his arrest would cause. He was released after a few hours, but his sticker became a popular image on social media and in future protests.43 Undeterred, a year later Ganzeer called for an international show of solidarity with “Mad Graffiti Week” on January 13–25, 2012, to protest against SCAF’s continued governmental control.44 In his appeal to activists, he continues to show how graffiti as symbolic violence can easily move to physical violence. In an open post on December 21, 2011, titled “An Appeal to Artists Everywhere,” he passionately described the need to use graffiti to highlight the continued crackdown on Egyptian dissidents:

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This is an appeal to save lives. . . . Soldiers have shown us no mercy, hitting fallen women with their batons, stomping on skulls with their boots and shooting unarmed civilians dead. I’ve seen this happen with my own eyes and was unable to stop it. It’s a soul-­shattering pain like no other. . . . Our only hope right now is to destroy the military council using weapons of art. From January 13 to 25, the streets of Egypt will see an explosion of anti-­ military street art. If you are a street artist elsewhere in the world, please do what you can in your city to help us.45

Numerous artists from a wide range of countries participated in the event, which highlighted the Egyptian military’s aggression. Painted walls throughout the region and the world reflected international solidarity. Ganzeer’s advertisements for the event underscored the violence embodied in conflict graffiti. One illustrates a direct standoff in which a masked soldier points a large automatic weapon at a spray can held by a disembodied hand. There are multiple ways to read this image, but in the image both are weapons, with the spray can illustrated as dangerous as the rifle. For Ganzeer, spray paint is a powerful force in the fight against SCAF. The image places spray-­paint bearers as “soldiers” for the people’s revolution; they are the ones who will stand up against SCAF’s military regime. The second image builds on the first, equating the protester’s use of graffiti as a weapon to fight against soldiers. In the powerful poster, demonstrators raise white silhouetted arms as a mask-­wearing soldier swings downward with his baton. Above him are three gas-­mask-­wearing figures (the same figure reproduced three times) holding cans of spray paint. Their physicality is more substantive than that of the police officer (and protesters); holding a spray can as a weapon, they are the ones who seemingly need to be feared by the army. Ganzeer has combined low-­fi, or low-­tech, resistance with a sophisticated online presence and activism to extend the revolutionary moment in Egypt. Although translated into English as “Mad Graffiti Week,” another translation from the Arabic is “Violent Graffiti Week.” This translation certainly works with the poster’s imagery; the graffiti writers are warriors (with spray paint as their weapon) fighting baton-­wielding army regulars. As with most of Ganzeer’s work, image and translation are layered. Commenting on the term violence, Ganzeer explained in an email to me, “The word ‘violent’ in Egyptian-­Arabic slang, though, is often used as ‘Much’ or ‘a lot’ or ‘intense,’ or all of those things at the same time.” While violence is certainly part of the imagery, he continues, “I don’t obsess about translations being literal as much as it’s important for me that

The Messy Politics of Conflict Graffiti : 79

Mad Graffiti Week poster. Credit: Ganzeer.

they better convey the meaning and mood behind the words instead.”46 Consistently the (earnest) trickster, fluent in English and Arabic, Ganzeer would not reveal the meaning or mood he was conveying. It is up to the readers of the graffiti to decide.

conflict graffiti as a political project Graffiti has a place in revolution. Ganzeer does not believe, however, that it is the main instrument to transform Egypt. As he wrote in his short story, “Jack Is Now out of the Box,” in Walls of Freedom, Basma Hamdy and Don Karl’s expansive and well-­researched book on Egyptian graffiti during the revolutionary period, graffiti (and artists) alone will not bring about a revolution. In his tongue-­in-­cheek futuristic essay that poked fun

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at the media focus on Cairo graffiti, Ganzeer fantastically describes how the global artistic community brought about the “fall of the world economic system,” allowing liberated countries to live in peace. Artists prevail and the world turns on the intersection of art and peace, “and to think it all started with some spray paint.”47 This ironic line underscores the limits of graffiti. For Ganzeer, spray paint did not start the Egyptian revolution in Egypt, nor will it cause a “new world order” to materialize. Graffiti, for Ganzeer, is one tool among many that are needed. To this end, Ganzeer rebels against the label “graffiti writer.” When the attention was shining most brightly upon him in 2011, he stated in bold letters on his website’s splash page, “I am not a Graffiti Writer,” a response to those who kept interviewing him because he was an “exotic” Middle Eastern writer of graffiti.48 Unlike others who, in Ganzeer’s view, embraced the title for personal fame, Ganzeer consistently rejected it because he was interested in the politics of the act of writing graffiti, not in graffiti as an aesthetic object. In an angry back-­and-­forth in the comments on Soraya Morayef’s suzeeinthecity blog—the best resource for graffiti in the early months of the revolution—Ganzeer rejects those who accuse him of seeking attention through street art: “I’ve never claimed to be a street artist, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t created street-­art.” He argues: “As far as being ‘too in love with the camera,’ again, I’m not the one hopping on board ‘graffiti-­related’ exhibitions or appearing in documentaries all Banksy-­esque.” In a direct reference to an Egyptian street artist, Ganzeer states, “Last and not least, I’m not the one signing every piece-­of-­shit stencil I do with a red tag that grabs far more attention than the stencil itself.”49 Ganzeer’s strong reaction reveals some of the pressures facing graffiti and street-­art practitioners during and after the 2011 uprisings. What does it mean to be a graffiti writer during a violent conflict? Questions of authenticity and accusations of selling out are part of the normal rhetoric of graffiti subculture. In terms of conflict graffiti, though, the stakes for Ganzeer are higher—as he stated, the artist has the ability to take down the king, after all, but only if he doesn’t fall in love with himself, becoming more interested in installing metal poodles in squares than in altering viewers’ consciousness. Ganzeer had no direct knowledge of global graffiti subcultures before he spray-­painted the Mubarak advertisement, and he is disdainful of the graffiti-­tagging culture, which he feels is too egocentric. Revolutionary desire informs his artwork, and street art is only one mechanism to inflame his fellow protesters. Unlike Ganzeer, others fully enmeshed in the international graffiti scene used their knowledge of the graffiti world and its history to express

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their revolutionary desires. As Ganzeer was writing his message against Mubarak on January 25, Hany Khaled, a graffiti writer and activist who was shot in the leg during the demonstrations, was in a different part of the crowd writing the same exact message. As he details: “That moment when someone carries me on his shoulders to help me write my proud bomb, ‘Down with Hosni Mubarak’ . . . and we turn back to the protesters, and I swear I see every single eye staring at me. And I shout, ‘Down with Mubarak’ while everyone repeats after me.”50 Khaled is a quiet, shy graffiti writer living in a working-­class section of Cairo. He wrote wildstyle Arabic graffiti before January 2011 and continues to do so today. Showing me the graffiti he sprayed near his apartment building, Khaled discusses his style’s evolution as well as the specific issues graffiti writers face in Egypt, including lack of access to professional spray paint. He’s familiar with other graffiti writers in Cairo, learning tips and discussing practices from traveling writers passing through the city. Khaled was active in the global graffiti scene before the protests, and his graffiti bombing was intertwined with his chanting—both harmoniously worked together. His graffiti practice before January 25 helped him find his strong voice during the protests. In my interview with Khaled, it is obvious his enthusiasm for the form he practiced before, during, and after the revolution runs deep, as does his desire to help others. While Ganzeer might rebel against the label of graffiti writer, Khaled embraces that mantle.

graffiti and garbage: various waves of political graffiti Regardless of whether one self-­identifies as a graffiti writer, the possibility of physical violence is ever present when spray-­painting during a conflict. Ganzeer’s conflict graffiti visually accuses the state of enacting violence on its citizens while articulating a vigorous defense. For Ganzeer, symbolic protest must be matched with physical revolt. As he told me: There’s also a very particular difference between revolt and protest. This is often confused in the media. When people gather in a protest and they ask the government nicely, “can you change these laws for us?” that’s very different from going and revolting against the entire regime. . . . As protesters you go and ask the government, which is what Egyptians have been doing for a long time, which is why they failed. It’s why the revolution failed because it’s taken the form of a protest but a protest that’s battered millions of people. . . . I’m not protesting for change because we shouldn’t be asking these really bad people to change for us in a nice way. We should say,

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“You guys are war criminals, you should all be incarcerated.” When that happens, we can say the revolution has succeeded. Prior to that, we can’t even have that discussion.51

Ganzeer is not interested in a Habermasian compromise; he believes in direct physical antagonism. In fact, although his spray-­painted “Down with Mubarak” and twenty-­six-­page pamphlet both acknowledge and resist the abuse inflicted on protesters, Ganzeer does not think of his work as political: “Because political, for me, is a very particular connotation— it makes me think of political parties.” Ganzeer does not have faith in parties or politicians who can be easily corrupted: The whole political system, as far as I’m concerned, is bullshit. I don’t care about who runs for whatever, who’s going to win. That’s not the point. The point is the social aspect or the social involvement of politics. . . . In general, my own personal belief has been, since the first day, that all of these elections and all of these befriendments and all of these whatever are just complete bullshit. Society should not in any way engage with those because we are still in the time of revolting against the state, not cooperating with the state for a particular system that they have in place.52

Ganzeer’s politics is a politics of refusal. But although he may be more vocal in his views than others, in my conversations with many who used graffiti during and after those eighteen days, there is widespread distrust of political parties and electoral politics. They were willing to risk their lives to bring down Mubarak or to articulate their anger toward SCAF and then toward President Sisi; they do not sit comfortably, however, under the umbrella of a political party. There is a deep belief in the power of direct action, but simultaneously, there is a distrust in electoral democracy. In this way, graffiti raises important questions about the limitations of direct action. The line between political and nonpolitical graffiti is certainly ambiguous, especially when comparing people enmeshed in the graffiti scene, like Khaled, and those who use it only as a tool, like Ganzeer. The following example illustrates this point: Yasmine El Rashidi, a Cairo journalist and novelist who has published a collection of essays on the Egyptian revolution, writes about her friend Ayman Ramadan, a graffiti writer, who stenciled a street sweeper in 2009 on the streets and walls of Cairo. The sweeper is a poignant symbol. Toward the end of Mubarak’s rule, Cairo was an overpopulated city with approximately seventeen million people in the greater metropolitan area. Trash filled the streets, and corruption was seen as the root cause for insufficient public services.53

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After his arrest in 2009 for vandalism, authorities repeatedly interrogated Ramadan over two days. Similar to Ganzeer’s interrogation, the military police’s primary question was whether the work was “political.” The police interpreted his graffiti, attempting to concretely link Ramadan to anti-­Mubarak movements. The graffiti, though, was not explicit—no overt messages of regime change, no obscene images of Mubarak. There was only a spray-­painted sweeper. The image’s ambiguity allowed for Ramadan’s release; the police concluded he was not a threat to the regime. Months later, Ramadan was again on the streets during the Tahrir Square demonstrations. “We’re free now . . . We can do whatever we want,” he stated while taking a picture of graffiti that said “Fuck the Police.”54 Reading Ramadan’s street sweeper and Ganzeer’s SCAF sticker in dialogue with each other, we see that both are politically motivated concerns about city life, albeit Ramadan’s (prerevolution) does so in a more muted way than Ganzeer’s (during the demonstrations). But before the revolution, the police did not view all graffiti as revolutionary tools, and as long as it was not explicitly anti-­Mubarak, they usually let writers go. At the heart of Ramadan’s street sweeper lies the question of what constitutes political graffiti. Not all political graffiti is as obvious as the Tahrir Square diatribes against Mubarak, and it is by this ambiguity that much of conflict graffiti abides. Ramadan’s street sweeper was meant to raise a political question about a “dirty” city. Importantly, his image of a sweeper has numerous interpretations, ranging from a request for removing actual garbage from the street to sweeping out corrupt “garbage” politicians. This semiotic ambiguity confused the authorities and ultimately led to his release unharmed—he was not explicitly calling on Mubarak to step down or supporting another political party. The ambiguity of Ramadan’s street sweeper kept him out of jail. In Beirut in 2015, activists also used “garbage” to rally around a political cause. Unlike Ramadan, though, these graffiti protesters were less ambiguous about who “stinks,” and consequently, authorities were more forceful in their responses. The “you stink” protests, known by the Arabic name Tol’et Rihetkun, or al-­harak al-­sha’by (the Popular Movement),55 began in Beirut after Lebanon’s main landfill closed. Trash piled up on city streets, and seasoned activists, many who learned tactics while participating in the Arab Spring protests, used graffiti to augment their street activism. On August 22, 2015, three thousand people responded to a call to protest government inaction. When riot police quelled the disturbance, ten thousand people were on the streets protesting the next day, resulting in more than four hundred people being injured. For Marwan Kraidy, the protests symbolically and metaphorically addressed the beheading of the

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body politic in Lebanon—“the nation as a decomposing corpse”—and “the notion of citizenship grounded in a body politic imagined to be non-­ sectarian and subject to the rule of law.” Kraidy points out that the rallying cry, “kellon ya’ny kellon,” or “all of them means all of them,” repeated in the graffiti was orchestrated to prevent one political party from taking control of the protest.56 Again, the activists’ politics are not one of Habermasian compromise; they are averse to parties and liberal electoral democracy. Like Ganzeer, these protesters were wary of political groups promising small incremental change and resisted anyone controlling the actions of the people. “You stink,” after all, is an accusation that polite political rhetoric cannot cover over. The protesters used the garbage on the streets as a specific issue people could relate to and then attempted to build their demands outward.57 Graffiti in this protest fell outside the normal parameters of party politics. For example, when demonstrators sought Speaker Nabih Berri’s removal from office, Prime Minister Tammam Salam responded by erecting portable concrete walls near the Grand Serail in Beirut’s Riad al-­Solh neighborhood. The protesters dubbed it the “Wall of Shame” and quickly painted slogans and images over it. This graffiti wave created what Azza El Masri calls “a jarring if somewhat chaotic portrait of Lebanon’s political reality”—a chaotic reality partly due to class antagonisms: 35 percent of the population lives at or below the poverty line, and a third of the population comprises displaced Syrians, Palestinians, and Iraqis. The walls reflected the messy confluence of these political issues, from corruption to human rights abuses, allowing for a reflection of multifaceted political desire. Realizing that the walls were becoming canvases for various political demands, after only a few days, Prime Minister Salam ordered them taken down.58 In Cairo, Ramadan’s street sweeper was a singular graffito that caused state police to question its meaning and then Ramadan himself. In the “You stink” protests in Beirut, protesters organized around garbage before spiraling outward to incorporate numerous other demands. Their graffiti demanded a larger collection of “garbage” to be removed. This is a graffiti and politics of negation, of sweeping “all” politicians out. For Ivan Krastev, this distrust of liberal democracy and protest of negation forms “a democracy of rejection” that disallows substantial positive political gains.59 Distrust of political parties was repeatedly expressed to me during the interviews I conducted. There are those using graffiti, however, to point out a different path from that of party politics or a politics of anger. Yazan Halwani is a self-­ described graffiti artist from Beirut who explained to me how he became

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involved with graffiti. When he was fourteen, he was fascinated by French gangsta rap and its subculture. He looked up graffiti online, learning about wildstyle, and came up with his own tag: ZN. Beirut, though, is a lot smaller than Paris or the other cities he discovered online; as he shared: “Give me ten cans of spray paint and a bike and I can tag all of Beirut in one night.” He’s right; graffiti is everywhere in Beirut. The city has a significant graffiti scene; like many major metropolitan cities, it has its own graffiti supply stores where writers meet up, and its own “stars” like Ashekman, who sell their artwork and T-­shirts in their own stores. On the streets, graffiti stencils of political parties appear near graffiti advertisements for rock concerts; other graffiti indicate where people can buy illegal drugs. Disney character graffiti emerge in numerous styles along back alleys.60 Surrounded by all this graffiti, Halwani found the scene lacking. He sought graffiti that reflected his own desires for what his city could become. When visiting his uncle one day, he found an old calligraphy book. It was a lightbulb moment for him; in the beautifully ornate Sufi letters he saw the seeds of the wildstyle graffiti he was drawing on the streets. He immediately began practicing, copying the letters from his uncle’s book. Practicing calligraphy was a significant moment for Halwani in the evolution of what he believes graffiti can do, describing his use of calligraphy as a poem to his city in the midst of conflict. Halwani describes his work as political—but echoing the other writers in this chapter, he disassociates the term from political parties. Instead, he describes himself as a vandal: he actively destroys posters and advertisements of political parties that adorn the streets, instead “mak[ing] the walls beautiful” with his art to “convey love.”61 Speaking with Sara Elkamel, he explains, “What I try to do is I try to evoke meaning without having to use the actual word . . . I use calligraphy to create an Arabic visual language which can be understood by Arabic and non-­Arabic speakers alike.”62 Instead of a formal alphabet, Halwani wishes to create an aesthetic language based on affect rather than letters. He is removing the “garbage” from the walls and consequently returning them back to the people. A child of the violence that rocked Lebanon during the civil war from 1975 to 1990 and the bombings and sectarian violence that has continued to the present, Halwani believes in being visible at political demonstrations, including marching during the “you stink” protests. But his work refuses simplistic political rhetoric—he feels that a single phrase cannot capture the problems facing his country. Instead, his artwork is meant “to replace corrupt politics with more positive cultural elements that show the real face of the country,” such as the Lebanese singer-­actress Sabah, of whom he painted a likeness on a street corner in the trendy Hamra neighborhood, surrounded by Arabic letters falling around her

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like flower petals or snow.63 For him, calligraphy is a political art form that, though pioneered by the Amsterdam artist Niels Shoe Meulman, has great potential for his own city. Although described as “Beirut’s Banksy,”64 which is more a reflection of journalists comparing Arab artists to ones better known to them, Halwani, unlike the British street artist, is uninterested in irony. Using his own money to buy spray paint, he paints Beirut with images combating the political corruption the posters symbolize, stating, “As a good citizen, I think everyone should be painting a wall.”65 One of his most beautiful images is of Fairuz surrounded by calligraphic letters (plate 7). Fairuz, born Nouhad Haddad in 1935, is a Lebanese singer known throughout the region and beyond. Halwani was looking for an icon that would unite people and chose the singer because, for him, she transcends generations. Even though Lebanese youth might not listen to her, “everyone” still likes her. To paint her image, as he explained to me, Halwani had to physically remove the politicians’ posters, his act of creation dependent on his act of rejection. He believes that graffiti is part of the “Robin Hood” tradition; he makes his salary from advertising companies, using his own money to “paint these poor walls.”66 Creating graffiti in a city that has experienced war and continuous conflict is important for Halwani; replacing politicians’ images with ones that unite is a political act that, while offering no concrete solutions, offers a unifying aesthetic. This merging of the political with the aesthetic to unite Beirut is why Halwani is upset with large graffiti-­themed Beirut festivals like Graph Me and White Walls. These festivals have brought in foreign graffiti writers, offering them prime spots to paint, while the organizers, in his view, left out Lebanese artists completely or placed them in subordinate positions. Halwani passionately believes that conflict graffiti unite the people of his city—it is a local expression that, though read by outsiders, needs to speak directly to the men and women of the community. Halwani’s image of Fairuz speaks to this view; while the singer is an icon throughout the region, Halwani painted it on a street corner in Beirut, tearing down posters of specific political candidates and replacing them with that of a beloved female singer. The image’s message may be ambiguous, but it is not strictly universalist—the graffiti mural has a direct connection to the sociopolitical moment of Beirut. The “garbage” is being removed, and Halwani offers something else in its wake. The massive calligraphy project Perception by eL Seed offers a way to altogether ignore “garbage” politicians, instead celebrating the men and women who spend their lives working with waste. This project emerged over several weeks in 2016 and covered more than fifty buildings in Man-

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Perception, Manshiyat Naser, Cairo. Mural and photo by eL seed.

shiyat Naser, a working-­class neighborhood populated by Cairo’s informal garbage collectors. The Zabaleen, or “garbage people,” are mostly Coptic Christians eking out a living by recycling up to 80 percent of the city’s waste. On each building, eL Seed and his team of local artists and friends painted a small part of a massive circle of blue, white, and orange calligraphic designs (plate 8). The whole piece is viewable only at a distance, from the top of Mokattam Mountain. The design contains the words of a third-­century Coptic bishop, “Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eye first.” The piece is somewhat universalist and ambiguous like Halwani’s Fairuz mural—there is no overt political statement, and the beauty of the piece, and its canvas, is unmistakable in its aesthetic complexity. The context, though, is essential to understanding the work. The work was painted by eL Seed in a Christian working-­class neighborhood under the approval of Father Samaan Ibrahim, who, with support of the local community, allowed the artist and his team into their homes. Importantly, eL Seed was creating this community-­inspired graffiti mural at a time when the Egyptian government was cracking down on the art scene in Cairo in anticipation of the fifth anniversary of the January 25 revolution. The police were particularly guarded against artistic expressions, raiding, for example, the Townhouse Gallery and the Rawabet Theater.67 Apparently, though, they ignored the poor Coptic Christian neighborhood of garbage collectors, proving eL Seed’s larger political point about “perception.” As he wrote on his Facebook page about the project—each

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day fifteen tons of Cairo trash are collected and recycled in Manshiyat Naser; these invisible men and women are part of the city’s urban ecosystem and have worked in the neighborhood since the 1970s.68 The work of eL Seed alters the perception of the city, restoring dignity to this working-­class part of town that had been ghettoized for class and religious reasons. Using calligraphy—an Islamic art form—on the homes of poor, marginalized Christians at the exact moment the Egyptian government was raiding art spaces in downtown Cairo to guard itself against further revolution is distinctly political. Like Halwani’s work, its content may be somewhat ambiguous, but the placement sharply focuses the message. Ganzeer violently used graffiti in his revolutionary fight against the armed forces. Ramadan quietly sprayed graffiti to call for a regime change in Egypt. Halwani’s calligraphy connects the people of Beirut together. The large-­scale calligraphy projects of eL Seed change people’s perception of a marginalized other. In my interviews with and research on these artists, they discussed their distrust of political parties and the need to unite people outside of established organizations. For them, politics is direct action. While Ganzeer’s work is distinctly more biting (and one of the reasons for his US exile), and Halwani’s art has less of an aggressive edge, the conflict graffiti mentioned above transforms the political landscape by transgressing laws and aesthetically creating new city spaces.

mohamed mahmoud street and the no walls campaign Mohamed Mahmoud Street is known for its braiding of revolutionary desire with conflict graffiti. As a main artery into Tahrir Square, this street is a strategic location where both protesters and police forces congregate. When crowds form in Tahrir Square, it is often on this street where the riot police assemble; it is also the street where demonstrators meet (or regroup) before heading en masse to protest at the Ministry of Interior. Morayef, an acute observer of this street for years, has described Mohamed Mahmoud as feeling like “a graveyard of the revolution,”69 and in many of her blog posts she has detailed the violence that has transformed this busy street into an often-­contested battleground. In this final section, I focus on two moments—the Port Said massacre and the No Walls campaign—where Mohamed Mahmoud’s street and wall protests have become intimately intertwined.70 On February 1, 2012, in the moments immediately following a football match in Port Said between the Cairo club Al-­Ahly and the local club Al-­ Masry, thousands of Cairo fans swarmed onto the pitch. The celebration,

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however, quickly turned violent, resulting in seventy-­four people dead and more than a thousand injured. There was a noticeable lack of police at the match, and the tragedy was deemed political, with some suggesting it resulted from anti-­SCAF chants by the Al-­Ahly fans at a previous game. When news of the tragedy spread, people poured onto the streets, and downtown Cairo was again a scene of massive protests. Many of the streets leading to Tahrir Square and the Ministry of Interior were barricaded, becoming the front line between soldiers and protesters, with Mohamed Mahmoud Street the locus of the most intense violence.71 On the night after the Port Said carnage, as thousands of protesters swarmed the streets and tear gas hung in air, graffiti writers and artists painted murals of those who had lost their lives. Ammar Abo Bakr, when he was not throwing rocks or arguing with Islamists over the revolutionary worth of graffiti and protests, painted walls throughout the night. As Morayef described them, Abo Bakr and his colleagues were “demonstrating artists, or artistic demonstrators.”72 Graffiti were part of the battlefield, and the interrelationship between the throwing of rocks and the placing of paint on walls manifested the same revolutionary impulse. These graffiti were illegal and spontaneous. In one photo of a particular wall is a mural display of a victim of the Port Said violence, a crescent and a cross, and some quickly drawn tags. On closer inspection, though, on the electricity box in front of the wall there were the sprayed words “No SCAF,” Arabic graffiti, and other smaller scratches and tags. This graffiti, presumably by different people, is overlaid on previously painted graffiti that was not completely erased; in one section of the wall, the ghostly words bleed through the green paint. It is a dialogue, a palimpsest of angry and violent conversations that allocates the victims of the Port Said violence a temporary physical space in the collective memory of the city. Various spray-­painted images share the same urban space, creating revolutionary assemblages. These multilayered messages interrupt each other—and in some cases erase parts of each other—but the overall assemblage of text and image create graffiti as vivid as a hand releasing a rock. As Abo Bakr states: “We react to the pulse on the street. We have nothing to do with any party or movement. Nor is anyone paying for this art. We don’t care if it’s erased. The street is in a confrontation with the Minister of Interior and we’re with the street.”73 The graffiti of Mohamed Mahmoud Street—and throughout Cairo—details this lack of political rigidity: anarchist symbols appear near passages of the Koran, the Twitter logo with the phrase “The revolution will not be tweeted” is stenciled in English near murals depicting classic Egyptian pharaonic figures, images of sexually assaulted victims are seen near images of murdered Coptic Christians. As some graffiti is

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whitewashed, new images emerge. The street—the city itself—has become alive, and, in the view of Abo Bakr, is an essential participant in the revolutionary process. Through graffiti, Saskia Sassen’s theoretical global street becomes a lived reality. In a response to this contested violence with the state, SCAF officials placed large blockades on the side streets that fed into Mohamed Mahmoud, thereby limiting the future flow of bodies into Tahrir Square. The twenty-­four-­foot walls are segmented square concrete blocks placed on top of each other, creating what the journalist Bradley Hope has called a “military zone” and what others have compared to smaller incarnations of the Berlin Wall.74 Unsurprisingly, these blockades have been sites of violence, and they, too, are covered with graffiti. But while graffiti on the walls of Mohamed Mahmoud Street have called attention to those who died violent deaths in the months after Mubarak stepped down, graffiti activists have made these new walls disappear. In February 2012, the No Walls campaign began as activists attempted to transform blockaded walls into passages, painting landscape scenes to “reopen” them by making the walls “invisible.” 75 These wall murals artistically replicated the street itself, with one on Yousef al-­Guindy Street dissolving the wall, artistically opening it up to traffic and pedestrians. While the blockade has stopped normal street function, these artists rearticulated it into a fanciful version of itself. Other walls have images of strolling mothers with baby carriages or a peaceful ocean view; these artists were attempting to remake the city’s militaristic landscape into a peaceful, idealized cityscape. Ibrahim Eissa, the editor of Al Tahrir, a newspaper critical of both Mubarak and Morsi, stated that the “politics of the concrete wall” initiated by SCAF were divisive and clearly attempted to dislocate protesters from the streets where the revolution was born.76 In response, the murals ideologically remove the walls by replacing them with wide-­open spaces. In this contentious space, the muralists decided to “bomb” them by making them beautiful. The project’s aesthetics question how this art reacts within the revolutionary moment. For example, when Banksy, the famous British graffiti provocateur, painted the Separation Wall in Palestine, an older resident told him to stop: “We don’t want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall.”77 The old man did not want the wall to become a canvas for art; he wanted it destroyed. The same question of “what does this graffiti do” confronts these Egyptian artists as the graffiti on the walls becomes more stylistically complex, leading to a variety of responses and aesthetic reactions. Is there a moment, a tipping point, when the walls will become solely artworks, shorn of their revolutionary message? Do the pieces become more

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associated with graffiti writers (as was the case for Banksy, which I discuss in the next chapter) than for the protest that inspired it? These questions resurface repeatedly throughout the remainder of this book. In this case, because numerous people, not a single artist, painted these walls, the graffiti images did not become part of a particular artist’s brand. In addition, unlike Banksy’s highly ironic pieces on the Separation Wall, the murals for the No Walls campaign imagine a new city and state emerging from the revolutionary fight taking place in the streets. For example, if we examine the mural on Cairo’s Sheikh Rihan Street (plate 9), we can see how the mural, while reflecting an idealized view of the city, also contains the violent history. The mural, created by Ammar Abo Bakr and others, is creatively and expertly painted, blending into the American University of Cairo on one side and green-­leafed trees on the other. In this photo, the street is peaceful and seemingly never ends. While the actual street overflows with litter and a faded crosswalk, within the mural, the water on the street reflects palm trees and a peaceful sky. The completed mural, though, inserts a graphic history of the street. In the forefront, a boy on a bicycle watches as a man attempts to save books burning in the Institut d’Égypte— a tragedy in which a fire destroyed or badly damaged more than two hundred thousand rare and ancient books.78 In this mural, we see assembled two main thrusts of revolutionary desire—remembrance of the violent spectral past and hope for an idyllic, peaceful street in the future. Mohamed Mahmoud Street’s graffiti were illegal and could have led, and in some cases did lead, to physical violence against the activists. They did not receive permission, but, as in decades of graffiti writers prior to this historic revolutionary moment, they decided to take their place on the wall. Revolutionary graffiti re-­creates the street, giving Cairo protesters rhetorical as well as seriatim openings where new forms of the political and social are always in a state of becoming. Graffiti, of course, do not act alone, participating instead in collaboration with a constellation of resistances—while some writers have chosen to make the walls beautiful, others have decided to physically tear them down. Both, though, are attempts to render the city landscape in a way that supports varied revolutionary aims.

conflict graffiti ’ s elasticity in cairo Although the No Walls campaign is one example of how conflict graffiti expresses revolutionary desire, as graffiti practices move from the impulsiveness found during those eighteen days of protest, graffiti as a revolu-

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Protesters attacking the Qasr Al Ainy Wall, Cairo. Photo by Lilian Wagdy.

tionary tool can become blunted. One example of this transformation is the collective the Freedom Painters, which formed on February 26, 2011, when four male and four female college students “decided to start a project that would deliver [their] points of view to every ordinary citizen walking by the street.” The collective started as a Facebook-­organized event in which twenty people met at a wall and painted murals and wrote inspirational messages such as “vote” and “don’t litter.” Following that success, the eight self-­titled administrators continued organizing events, awarding certain people wall space; from donations they collected, they supplied paint and “allowed” others to draw the outline that community members filled in. Noha Ahmed, one of the Freedom Painters’ administrators, noted that graffiti was a “trend in the Arab Spring,” and they felt their work was “the start of a new graffiti—a revolutionary one.”79 This idealism is evident in the murals Ahmed showed me. For example, Khaled, a dentistry student and avid member of the group, painted a mural of an Egyptian with a flag under her eye and the words (in English) “Egyptian and proud.” Although Ahmed believes the art movement is “a new graffiti,” it is certainly reminiscent of other large public art or antigraffiti campaigns, especially the successful graffiti arts programs established in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s—Graffiti Alternatives Workshop being the most famous—that celebrated community-­based painting. After the Tahrir Square demonstrations, the Freedom Painters wanted a public arts project that celebrated being Egyptian. There is, however, a distinct ideo-

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logical divide between the Freedom Painters’ murals and the art attacks by Ganzeer, Ammar Abo Bakr, and others. Although the press has given the Freedom Painters the nomenclature of graffiti artists, this group—­ unlike the others mentioned in this chapter—wants to work within a legal framework. In March 2012, they went on hiatus because they were unable to acquire additional funds: “Painting on a wall should be by permission from the land owner.” When further questioned about painting in the public sphere, the group stated that “it’s true that the wall is a public wall, but with us, it’s not OK for anyone to draw anything” because this was a communal group and all members were associated with it.80 This view is a striking ideological break from other graffiti writers, who in their resistance to authority want to break laws and not work within them. Immediately after Mubarak stepped down, there was a “war on graffiti” against anti-­SCAF pieces.81 For the Freedom Painters to continue, they would need to produce pieces that did not disturb the power balance of those in authority. If they didn’t, as graffiti writers Ali al-­Halabi, Ahmad Samhan, Janzir, Ganzeer, and others have discovered, the military police could detain them for harsh questioning.82 The writers scrawling “Down with Mubarak” on Tahrir Square’s walls or Ganzeer, who offered mass-­producible DIY anti-­SCAF stencils on his website, attempted to disrupt the locus of state power; artists working within the law must appease both viewer on the street and government overseer of the wall. For Dovey, Wollan, and Woodcock, “While vandalism transgresses the law, art frames a range of discursive transgressions.”83 A desire to work legally is a reason that sanctioned public art is often intimately intertwined with the machinations of the state apparatus.84 This is clear in Khaled’s nationalist-­inspired graffiti. The art might be beautiful, but legally sanctioned murals can become a key component of solidifying state power.85 The reappropriation of cultural practices of resistance is certainly not new to the graffiti subculture; what is fascinating is the speed to cannibalize and delimit resistive graffiti. Multinational corporations and brands such as Cherokee, Coca-­Cola, Pepsi, and Mobinil have all used graffiti-­style advertisements in postrevolution Cairo to market their brands that, at best, sell subcultural “cool” and, at worst, convert revolutionary impulses into commodity fetishism. Cherokee’s wildstyle lettering in its ad to “live your life” during a revolutionary time by driving in a car named after a subjugated indigenous tribe is a perfect example of the reaches of neoliberal, geopolitical capitalism.86 Cairo’s art galleries, such as the Townhouse Gallery and the Articulate Baboon Gallery, have also capitalized on graffiti’s popularity by hosting “street art” exhibitions. These displays dislocate revolutionary graffiti from the streets and place it within the walls of galleries, offering sanc-

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tioned, commercial assemblages. This repurposing of graffiti certainly does something different from the graffiti found (and erased) in Tahrir Square. This tension was at the heart of the September 18, 2011, exhibition at the Townhouse Gallery cheekily titled This Is Not Graffiti. The exhibit self-­consciously questions whether graffiti profoundly changes when placed in a confined space. Morayef, who organized the exhibit, states: “When I developed this concept [for the show], I received a lot of flak for commercializing/bastardising/mainstreaming an underground art scene that belonged to the street. While I don’t completely subscribe to this puritanical belief, I wanted to bring graffiti artists inside and see if audiences would still come to see their work.”87 The crowds arrived, and the reaction, as expected, was mixed. The divide between the dichotomous worlds of graffiti as vandalism and graffiti as art has been argued over in the United States ever since Warhol befriended Basquiat. In Egypt, in the raw aftermath of the post-­Mubarak era, this divide is even more troubled. This tenuous tripartite relationship between graffiti, the revolutionary impulse, and the city landscape is constantly being reterritorialized, and, as the transition from Mubarak rule to the Morsi presidency to Sisi’s reign, the future forms of graffiti in Cairo are unknown. As the city rebuilds its identity, though, Cairo seems to be able to contain multiplicities—with graffiti still offering new apertures for cultural practices of resistance.

sad panda In concluding this chapter, I focus on a particular graffiti artist whose images during the revolutionary moment push conflict graffiti’s parameters in fascinating ways. Like the others in this chapter, Sad Panda does not believe in political parties or think that his work is political. In fact, he never had faith in the revolution. The elusive artist with whom I had the pleasure of speaking to in an apartment overlooking a Cairo neighborhood was adamant that his panda art is neither a clarion call for change nor one of hope in a brighter future. Instead, he views his graffiti (and life philosophy) as a way to spread sadness throughout the world: “That’s the main point of what I do. I’m just spreading the sadness. I think people are too shallow thinking everything is happy.”88 Sad Panda began tagging to relieve boredom at school. For reasons he can’t quite pinpoint, he began drawing pandas on desks and lockers. In high school, he discovered he didn’t like people but began to be more curious about them—especially their focus on mindless consumerism. College, he felt, was a waste of time, and he began drawing more earnestly, putting his Sad Panda in public places like tables at restaurants,

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elevators, and apartment hallways. He learned about street art from the internet and began talking with other graffiti artists through Facebook. He met Aya Tarek, a pioneering Egyptian street artist, who helped orchestrate a street-­art workshop in Alexandria. He admired her work because he found it socially engaging but not overtly political. He learned from Tarek and others how to document, preserve, and disseminate his work on the streets. From this meeting, he also connected with other street artists in Egypt, including Ganzeer. But while Ganzeer saw art as a weapon to combat government forces, Sad Panda was not convinced. On the night before the Tahrir Square revolution, Sad Panda was in a bar talking to friends about how “nothing changes in Egypt.” When the revolution began in earnest the following day, he was sleeping. After driving the deserted streets for a few hours with friends, he spent the next week watching the protests play out on TV. He had no interest in writing graffiti or joining others in Tahrir Square. “I like doing stuff because I like doing it,” he told me, questioning the motives of many artists responsible for the large explosion of street art in the days, weeks, and months after the demonstrations. He stayed mostly at home for two months, but after seeing so much “bad work,” he did a few pieces on the streets, photographed them, and uploaded them to the internet. Ganzeer asked Sad Panda to be part of Mad Graffiti Weekend and his larger collaborative piece, Tank vs Bread-­Biker. Not one to get involved in group projects, he declined. Instead, after everyone went home, he placed his sad panda on the wall near, but not directly part of, the action. His panda received attention from various media outlets that wondered about its significance to the revolution. He did not see, though, a larger meaning: “It was just my ‘I am here.’ It was something I used to do on my school desk. I didn’t get it. I got freaked out.” It did not stop Sad Panda, though, from producing more graffiti, including stenciling images of a boy with a slingshot or of a soldier carefully placing a young child’s body on a wood fire. Sad Panda also did a collaboration with Moza, a feminist graffiti artist (although like Sad Panda, she does not consider herself political),89 placing a paste-­up of middle-­class veiled faceless women and girls in a living room with Sad Panda watching. Despite the subject matter, he adamantly argues against his work as “political”: “No! That’s not political . . . It’s more sarcasm than ‘Let’s do some stuff! Let’s go to the streets!’ I’m not a political person, but at the end, I’m living here. So when I get an idea about anything I want to do, it’s related to what is happening around me. . . . So it’s going to be normal to me to sketch about that. That doesn’t mean I’m political.” Repeatedly in our conversation, Sad Panda decried artists who feel that street art can change the world, stating that if drawing a fat bear changes Egyptian his-

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tory than that itself is pretty sad: “Politics only kills art, not the other way around.” Sad Panda’s work falls somewhat ambiguously within conflict graffiti. It is not overtly political, and the “sadness” he is spreading in the aftermath of Mubarak’s abdication is certainly different from the graffiti of Ammar Abo Bakr, Ganzeer, Alaa Awad, Hany Khaled, Yazan Halwani, or eL Seed. Its ambiguity is confusing to the state, which does not know how to read and interpret Sad Panda. Is it antigovernment vandalism? A secret anti-­Sisi code? Is it a harmless doodle? Sad Panda argues an interesting point about his own work’s reception: “Someone wrote about my graffiti and analyzed it as the ‘political panda.’ What is a political panda? How can a panda be political?!”90 It’s a valid question, and the answer lies in how people perceive it. When I was walking the streets of downtown Cairo in 2014, the government was in the process of erasing political graffiti from walls. On one of the side streets near Mohamed Mahmoud, patches of white paint badly covered overtly political graffiti. In the middle of the block, though, was an untouched Sad Panda surrounded by white patches. Apparently, when the “professional whiteners” came to a forlorn panda staring out at them, they decided it was not political and left in unharmed on the wall. Sad Panda, like all the other graffiti writers mentioned in this chapter, does not believe in party politics to enact change in Egypt. He also, though, has no faith in the revolution. Linking consumerism and twenty-­ first-­century capitalism as factors blinding people to their fugue state, Sad Panda hopes that his work acts like a virus, infecting people to see the world as it truly is: sad. His desire is not to enact political change, and his work can be seen as counterproductive to revolutionary desire. When constructing conflict graffiti components, however, Sad Panda’s close proximity and interaction with the other graffiti on Cairo’s walls assembles a narrative of the competing desires. Because walls are open, when he placed his Sad Panda next to Tank vs Bread-­Biker, it became part of the overall conversation about graffiti and the Arab Spring and, also, the larger discussion of revolutionary desire.

• Joe Austin, playing with Emma Goldman’s famous quote, writes, “A revolution that does not allow the citizens to write on the city walls can be no revolution at all.”91 Revolutions, though, happen organically and without a unified center; as the images discussed throughout this chapter attest, the revolution has many actors and numerous dialects. Will Ganzeer and Sad Panda change their styles as more international attention focuses on

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Sad Panda with white paint, Cairo. Photo by John Lennon.

their work?92 How will the Egyptian military, fighting graffiti writers from both sides of the political divide, react to the writing on the walls? While the situation is still in a state of Deleuzian becoming, if Saskia Sassen is correct and a nascent “global street” was born from the Tahrir Square protests and thus a new Cairo, this much is known: the walls of the new city will continue to have paint on them. And the residents of the city—and unknown numbers of people around the world—will continue to read them.

Flying Balloon Girl, Separation Wall. Mural by Banksy. Photo by John Lennon.

3 : ERASING PEOPLE AND LAND banksy, the separation wall, and international graffiti tourists

The renowned street artist Banksy traveled to the West Bank in 2005, famously painting Flying Balloon Girl directly onto the Separation Wall near Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem. The stencil is poignantly simple: seven balloons magically lift a young girl upward. The message is seemingly as basic as the artwork: through magic realism and notions of childhood innocence, the young girl embodies a dreamy, supernatural hope as the balloons lift her up from her stark surroundings. Banksy has been drawing young girls with balloons since at least 2002, when he stenciled Girl with Balloon on a South Bank wall near the National Theater in London. That image portrays a sad young girl watching her heart-­shaped balloon float away, accompanied by text that reads “There is always hope.” Two years later a similar image was found near Liverpool Street Station right before Banksy released a limited edition of six hundred prints of the girl reaching out for her balloon. He didn’t stop there.1 In 2009, Girl and Balloon appeared on a carboard inset of an Ikea frame. Nine years after he placed the girl on the Separation Wall in Palestine, Banksy became involved with the #WithSyria online campaign. This time he drew the girl with a hijab and her lost balloon (itself a bit peculiar as Muslim women do not typically begin wearing hijabs until after puberty).2 To this day, Banksy’s stencils of little girls with or without balloons continue to resonate even after he partially shredded an original Girl with Balloon in a publicity stunt during a live auction at Sotheby’s (the artwork still sold for £1.04 million).3 After all, Banksy’s earnest young girl is a symbolic rendering of hope. For this reason, I suspect, she has become his most recognizable stencil, reproduced on numerous postcards, coffee mugs, T-­shirts, books, and bodies throughout the world.4 As a tattoo on

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the bicep of a woman I met in New York City, the young girl was her outwardly feminist statement on overcoming patriarchy; as a small-­framed poster hanging over a urinal in a hipster bar in Tampa, Florida, the girl was a recognizable distraction. In 2017, Girl with Balloon replaced John Constable’s The Hay Wain as Britain’s most beloved work of art.5 Banksy’s image has easily slipped into crafted individualized meanings, anchored in recognizable and, somewhat banal, universal messages of hope. In his 2005 rendering on the Separation Wall near Bethlehem, the girl who had lost her balloon now has balloons that allow her to fly. Placed on the Separation Wall, Flying Balloon Girl could speak to a transcendent desire to return to a time when no barriers separated Palestinians from their former land. As an image alone, though, there is of course no connection between this girl and the Palestinian desire to return. Instead, Flying Balloon Girl represents a universal desire to magically escape life’s difficulties. A decade after Banksy placed the stencil on the Separation Wall, his image has become not a statement on Palestinian rights but a familiar image of the Banksy brand. To use Walter Benjamin’s term, the “aura” of Flying Balloon Girl has been diminished as it has become a reproducible signpost for what is now readily identifiable as a Banksy: if you can drink your coffee from a mug emblazoned with Flying Balloon Girl bought from Overstock.com, then the artwork is probably not one to be contemplated but rather one to be experienced as a distraction.6 As Benjamin writes, “The public is an examiner, but an absent-­minded one.”7 Flying Balloon Girl’s reproducibility as a universal symbol of hope places it on a similar plane as an inspirational cat poster; people derive meaning and pleasure from the image, but the work’s aura as historically situated is weakened. For Benjamin (and/or fans of Banksy), this is not necessarily cause for concern. Rather, it’s a simple fact of what happens to an art object in a modern capitalist world. The “original” Flying Balloon Girl on the Separation Wall (itself a stencil whose outline Banksy and/or his team made elsewhere) was created at a particular time and place, experienced firsthand by the individuals who walked past the wall. The initial impression, like most of Banksy’s images, is seemingly straightforward: unable to go through the border wall, a little girl magically rises above it. On closer inspection, though, the message seems more complicated, even complicit. In Flying Balloon Girl the girl is dressed in Western-­style clothes and has a long ponytail. The unanswered question is obvious once one recognizes her appearance: Why would a presumed young Western girl need extraordinary measures to bypass the wall when a non-­Palestinian passport would most likely do the trick?8 For a simple stencil, it carries a ton of ideological baggage. I came across the stencil while in a van traveling to Ramallah, years

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after Banksy placed this image on the wall and after I had seen Flying Balloon Girl countless times online. It wasn’t the magic balloons, now surrounded by plenty of other graffiti (and an angry splash of white paint covering over some of them), that made me do a double take. It was her ponytail. I never noticed the little girl’s hair until I stood in the shadow of the wall, a testament to my own Western biases. In Banksy’s first public trip to Palestine, he decided to create a figure more associated with the magical flying Mary Poppins of his home country than with the Palestinian people. It is this type of political-­aesthetic choice and its implications I wish to analyze when exploring the role of “graffiti tourists” who enter foreign conflict zones and spray graffiti.9 Banksy’s West Bank graffiti highlights a key component of conflict graffiti: how paint on walls can bring intense international focus to a conflict while also erasing the people and places the graffiti supposedly highlights. Graffiti has the potential to frame the conflict, influencing how it is perceived. This chapter investigates the attention Banksy’s Separation Wall murals brought to the region. Border walls are a physical and symbolic testament to a nation’s ability to control its borders. Graffiti on border walls visually tests the nation’s ability to do so. As discussed in the introduction to this book, at its most basic function, the Separation Wall performs physical and ideological endings: it ends contact among citizens and noncitizens; movement of people, languages, and cultures; and, at times, life itself. The wall, with its attached Bentham-­inspired panoptical towers (that may or may not contain an armed soldier), brutally performs its role as a forceful end to a nation. In direct confrontation to its rhetorical performativity, graffiti on a border wall call attention to the wall, to the inherent violence embedded within and, importantly, to the land lying beyond. Instead of an ending, graffiti create openings that show multiple potential meanings of the wall and thereby point to new, imagined futures. Whether the graffiti are sarcastic or earnest, pictorial or wordy, when we read graffiti on the border wall, we read the wall in a new context. As highlighted throughout this book, graffiti become part of this divisive architecture’s materiality, interacting with it and offering messages that are often contrary to those of the wall itself. Graffiti focuses attention upon the wall and, in doing so, calls attention to the land and people beyond it. In this sense, graffiti offer a visual way to look through the wall, creating imaginary spaces. Graffiti show the wall’s performed endings are never really endings. Border walls are ideological state-­sponsored rhetorical acts of security. Graffiti argues back. But while the act of writing graffiti is political (and often risky), each sprayed message or image offers a different take on the overall political conversation.

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Together, they assemble a compelling argument against the wall and also offer other imagined futures. These abstract possibilities, however, are not necessarily created by locals. These imagined futures, therefore, are not always anchored socially, ideologically, or spatially within the conflict itself. As the graffiti become part of an artist’s brand, decontextualized as each image is clicked on and retweeted through the internet, significant questions regarding the politics and intentionality of transnational activists must be raised. Banksy’s globally branded spotlight on the Israeli-­Palestinian conflict will be our case study for analyzing border-­wall graffiti as a visualization of politics. In this chapter, I explore ways that graffiti visualizes marginalization and, in the case of Palestinians, colonization. Just as important, I explore the limits of international stars like Banksy in interacting with the populace and how branded graffiti often erase the people and the colonized land that the graffiti are supposed to spotlight.

banksy and imagined paradises Banksy is the most famous street artist in the world. A shadowy figure who began as a graffiti writer in Bristol, England, in the 1980s, he is now a world-­renowned artist-­provocateur. In recent years, he has expanded his reach beyond graffiti, including directing the critically acclaimed film, Exit through the Gift Shop (2010); having an illegal art “residency” in New York City in 2013; designing the pop-­up dystopian attraction Dismaland in England in 2015; opening a Palestinian hotel with “the worst view in the world” in 2016; and in 2020 funding and painting the Louise Michel, a rescue boat for refugees attempting to leave northern Africa for Europe.10 A self-­proclaimed “vandal,” like Andy Warhol before him, Banksy can be both outside and inside the well-­heeled art community, reaping huge sales at auctions while simultaneously (gently) biting the hand that feeds him.11 Much of his work is cheeky fun, and he often uses humor to spotlight world conflicts, including by placing his ironic glare on the Israeli-­ Palestinian border wall. Before his fame, though, Banksy was a suburban kid who discovered graffiti through a local youth club run by John Nation, an influential graffiti figure in Bristol’s Barton Hill district. Nation organized legal graffiti spaces in the club and in the surrounding area. Barton Hill, a working-­ class area, became known for its graffiti scene, and kids flocked there to (illegally) paint—so much so that eventually the British police implemented Operation Anderson, in which they arrested seventy-­two local graffiti writers.12 The result of this massive police attention meant that many of the area’s original writers stopped writing. Others, though,

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quickly took their place. Banksy, a private school student who started writing around the age of fourteen, became involved in the graffiti scene after the arrests. Of course, none of these “facts” are verified. Quite possibly, they are completely fictional. Part of what makes the Banksy brand so popular is that he doesn’t make personal public appearances. In the present moment when privacy is disappearing, Banksy has remained in the shadows. Is he one person? A team of people? I spoke to many in Palestine who supposedly met him, or met someone who met him, while he was painting in the West Bank and Gaza (including a man in the back of a real estate office near Bethlehem who claimed to have Banksy’s private number on speed dial). The veracity of these stories is highly suspect, but the rumors are what build the Banksy brand.13 He is part of a “generation” of experimental graffiti writers that helped reintroduce graffiti to a mass audience. In a little over a decade, Banksy went from self-­professed “art vandal” to being valorized by the Sunday Mail as Britain’s “unlikeliest national treasure.”14 How could a man who has a famous stencil depicting Queen Victoria receiving oral sex be described by the British press as a “national treasure”? Besides the quality of his art, part of his fame is a direct result of his remarkable self-­promotion, a staple for all graffiti writers, but something that Banksy has certainly mastered better than most. After spending years gaining renown on the streets of Bristol, Banksy organized his first art show at the Severnshed restaurant in 2000. The pub was a popular hangout for graffiti writers, and Banksy and others simply hung their work up there. His first public showing was successful; many of his paintings sold, including the (in)famous Riot Green and Self-­Portrait. A year later, he illegally commandeered a tunnel on London’s Rivington Street and placed his artworks on its walls, celebrating and promoting his show by blasting music out of a car to call attention to the event. Banksy would go on to continue to embrace and expand the spectacle around the selling of his art.15 In 2002, the year he first placed Girl with Balloon near the National Theater, Banksy organized his inaugural pop-­up show, Santa’s Ghetto, in a small room at the Dragon Bar on Leonard Street, in Shoreditch. Promoting “gift” vandalism for the whole family, Santa’s Ghetto is the epitome of Banksy’s ethos; while poking fun at the commercialism of Christmas, he also used the holiday to sell his products. A year later, he expanded his reach, staging the much larger Turf War in 2003 in a former warehouse in Hackey. The three-­day pop-­up event included a cow sprayed with Warhol’s face.16 The show’s artwork played with the ironies and violence of capitalism while also receiving support from the European com-

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pany Puma (an official Banksy shirt sold at the show, for example, had the Puma logo on it). Describing the event as “brandalism,” Banksy promoted his steadily rising brand by accepting money from corporate sponsors, which were more than happy to associate themselves with Banksy’s bankable cool. The show was another success; he sold numerous works and received extensive media attention.17 Even though a follow-­up Santa’s Ghetto on Shoreditch’s Carnaby Street in 2004 was understated, in 2005, Banksy upped the ante, heading to the West Bank, an event that, as I describe in this chapter, added much to his fame. After these exploits garnered worldwide attention, he capitalized on his notoriety by staging numerous large-­scale events. The Banksy brand continued to grow. Two months after he went to the West Bank, Banksy opened a show titled Crude Oils at which he released 164 rats and allotted only three minutes to visitors to look at his artwork.18 In November, the well-­respected art-­book publisher Century released Wall and Piece, an updated collection of three of Banksy’s previously self-­published books. Following the tremendous success of the book’s release, in September 2006, Banksy rented a huge Los Angeles warehouse for a three-­day event titled Barely Legal, promoted to, and visited by, A-­list celebrities. Catering to Hollywood stars like Jude Law and Angelina Jolie, the show had all the flare of a Banksy production, including a red-­painted elephant adorned with fleurs-­de-­lis to expertly match the wallpaper of the room.19 The show also contained some overt political statements. As visitors admired the thirty-­seven-­year-­old Indian elephant, they received a handout that read: “1.7 billion people have no access to clean drinking water. 20 billion people live below the poverty line. Every day hundreds of people are made to feel physically sick by morons at art shows telling them how bad the world is but never actually doing something about it. Anybody want a free glass of wine?”20 The stunt may have lacked in originality, but Banksy did flesh out the well-­known metaphor: there was actually a large elephant in a room. And unlike the metaphorical elephant, the real one garnered attention from the media and animal rights protesters arguing against the animal’s inclusion in the show.21 Was the elephant in the room a (factually inaccurate) reference to global poverty and water rights, or was it a shallow prank mimicking the superficiality of art shows? It’s not clear, nor is it really the point. Banksy’s anonymity freed him from explaining his political stance (his spokesman, Simon Munnery, conceded “contradictions” in his politics). By presenting the elephant and playfully poking at the contradictions of political art and Hollywood celebrity, Banksy was able to advance his brand without entrenching himself in any specific cause or debate. In Édouard Louis’s memoir Who Killed My Father?, the author states

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that politics for the rich is always more about form than content: “For the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics, a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality.”22 Banksy’s amorphous politics are always seen through the filtered light of his art; in other words: “Yes, not being able to have clean drinking water is bad, but did you see the color of that elephant? It matched the wallpaper!” In this and in much of his art, we can see Banksy raising the specter of politics before retreating back to the safe confines of humor. This art prank differs from those of other political artists who use humor to raise awareness of a particular political cause. When looking at the elephant—or much of Banksy’s work—the focus is on his aesthetics, not the actual politics to which his art (somewhat) alludes. Politics, in this sense, is pure aesthetic performance, not a lived state. Louis’s provocative view of politics of the disaffected wealthy, then, is one way to frame Banksy’s activist graffiti tourism throughout the West Bank.

banksy, land, and erasure In 2005 Banksy famously painted (at least) nine murals in and around Bethlehem. These murals appear on the Separation Wall and on private homes and businesses in the surrounding area (when traveling through Bethlehem, my guide brought me to a house and, moving overgrown bushes, showed me what he described as a Banksy on a private residence). The images Banksy created and placed during his “graffiti holiday” underscore some of the delicate issues artists face as they enter political and social conversations they do not fully understand. Art, like humor, doesn’t always translate as expected. With place-­based public art, context matters, and good intentions do not necessarily erase Western bias. For example, one of Banksy’s Bethlehem murals, Donkey Documents, depicts an Israeli soldier checking a donkey’s papers. Banksy’s intent may have been to show the absurdity of Israeli checkpoints, highlighting the frustrating delays Palestinians face daily when trying to move about the West Bank. Some Bethlehem residents, however, were angry and vocal about it, thinking the artwork depicted Palestinians as pack animals.23 Nasri Canavati, a restaurant owner in Bethlehem, stated: “We’re humans here, not donkeys. This is insulting.”24 Banksy may have been commenting on the oppressive control of the Israeli state, but the local audience read his work differently.25 The mural insulted many Palestinians, and they were angry enough to want to destroy it. The artist’s cultural blindness, however, did not do any damage to his own brand. The owner of the building cut the Banksy piece out from his wall and shipped it to the United Kingdom, where it was auc-

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Donkey Documents, near Bethlehem. Mural by Banksy. Photo by Courtney Niebrzydowski.

tioned off to the highest private bidder.26 Banksy’s “political” piece had the most (economic) value only when taken out of context. In an advertisement for the sale, Julien’s Auctions whitewashed any associated politics. There was no mention of the controversy or how Palestinians negatively received the art. Instead, the ad copy focuses almost exclusively on the artist and the overall financial value of Banksy’s street art.27 One reason Donkey Documents upset Palestinians is that they assumed that a mural commenting on the checkpoints’ negative effects on Palestinians’ lives would include an image of a Palestinian—for them, it is not a huge logical leap to assume the donkey refers to them. This idea and the associated image crystallize much of what Banksy’s West Bank graffiti murals do: erase the Palestinian people. Intentional or not, this erasure of people and, as we will see, land, is an important, undertheorized aspect of Banksy’s art activism. In examining his other murals on and around the Separation Wall, especially his trompe l’oeil graffiti murals, and comparing those images to other artists’ work in conflict areas, Banksy’s erasure of people and land becomes clearer. Flying Balloon Girl attempts to rise above the wall. In the murals I discuss in this chapter, Banksy’s art magically breaks through the wall. By doing so, Banksy calls attention to the object of the wall itself, showing worlds beyond the one divided by the wall—imagined worlds speaking to Banksy’s brand of humor, his art’s political sensibilities, and his own cultural biases. These murals are reminiscent of the No Walls campaign

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Banksy-­Boy with Bucket, long view of the Separation Wall. Photo by Marco Di Lauro.

in Egypt in 2011; although, as detailed in chapter 2, the local Egyptian artists anchored the art in that campaign to particular streets in downtown Cairo, imagining the possibility of the blocked streets being returned to the people. Banksy’s murals are worth noting for how they make the wall “disappear.” Using a type of magical realism, he reinvents a land without walls, but one that does not conjure a return to the real. In one of Banksy’s trompe l’oeil graffiti murals on the Separation Wall, two children are outlined in black and playing on what appears to be a beach—they have buckets, and one has a shovel. Both children look out at the viewer, and behind and above them is a colorful breakout—a section of the wall itself seems as if it has been destroyed, revealing a tropical beach scene with palm trees, a sandy beach, and a gorgeous coastline.28 In another, the view through the wall is of a child on top of what looks like a rubble mountain, holding a yellow bucket and smiling happily out to the viewer.29 In a third, the mural showcases two enormous, overstuffed living room chairs (with matching doilies) and a small table adorned with a single flower in a vase. Above the table and chairs is a large window showing in the distance a beautiful, snow-­covered mountain surrounded by green forest.30 Banksy’s art is meant to be viewed quickly, and the payoff is immediate. Much of his work relies on dissonance—the incongruous relationship between the images presented and the environment in which those images appear; the hook is that the two don’t logically fit together. Like Warhol placing Brillo boxes on a museum’s floor (or Banksy himself

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sneaking into New York’s Museum of Modern Art and placing discount Tesco soup cans on display31), the viewer begins to question the association between object and place, revealing ideological underpinnings about seemingly commonsense ideas. When confronted with tomato cans or boxes in a museum, the viewer questions the perhaps previously uninterrogated idea of art. What makes something art? Is it the object itself or where the object is placed? Who gets to decide? Similarly, when faced with a beautiful beach or a majestic mountain on a wall of such starkness and embedded violence, viewers witness a seeming breach in the state’s security apparatus, questioning (perhaps) previously unchallenged foundational notions of security. Seeing kids playing in colorful tropical paradises, seemingly far away from the violent reality of a border wall, calls into question who exactly the border wall is stopping. Banksy murals focus attention on the West Bank’s Separation Wall by erasing a section of it; his paint dissolves the wall to reveal fantastical worlds beyond or within it. Like most of Banksy’s art, his trompe l’oeil murals are based on a simple (though devastating) joke—if you break through the wall, you will not see heavily armed Israeli soldiers, or barbed wire, dirt, litter, or the numerous vans, taxis, and army vehicles that patrol the area. Instead, an ocean with palm trees and sandy beaches lies on the other side. How does Banksy’s art work? Significantly, it does not show the Palestinian homeland. Rather, his imagined space consists of popular images from a British middle-­class tourist holiday. Instead of conjuring the Palestinian land, he illustrates a vacation paradise. No olive trees but imagined palm trees. Does Banksy’s magical realism spotlight the plight of the Palestinian struggle for their human and land rights, or does the light shine mostly on the Banksy brand? Asked in another way, do the artist’s murals enter a global language of activist resistance to the Israeli Separation Wall, or do they speak a primarily self-­referential Banksy dialect? The answer, of course, does not fit neatly into an either-­or dichotomy. What conflict graffiti can and cannot do emerges when examining Banksy’s border-­wall graffiti within a broader cultural, political, and economic context. In heeding Lila Abu-­Lughod’s warning about “romanticizing resistance,” Banksy’s art cannot be categorically celebrated or dismissed; rather, how his art works within the sociopolitical context of a conflict zone must be analyzed.32 When a famous British artist clandestinely heads to Palestine on a “graffiti holiday,” bringing his street art and graffiti friends along for the ride, the way he expresses his transnational solidarity for Palestinians must be questioned. Banksy’s murals disappeared part of the wall and imagined another land beyond its confines.

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This disputed land is at the crux of the violent conflict between Israel and Palestine.

the politics of visualizing erasure In his Separation Wall murals, rather than seeing the land as belonging to a particular people, Banksy imagines the land as a universalized, generic paradise. This fantastical land fits uncomfortably along the spectrum of a Palestinian politics of resistance and slides more easily into Zionist exceptionalism. For Zionists, this “empty” land is a type of paradise all Jews can call a homeland, justifying their expansion into Palestinian territory, an area they refer to as Judea and Samaria in order to lay claim to (disputed) historical roots.33 Visualizing Palestine as a terra nullius recalls a Manifest Destiny–­like view in which settlers must populate the barren terrain. In 1869, during a brief trip to the Middle East in the middle of a hot Mediterranean summer, Mark Twain traveled to Palestine and, writing about his experiences in The Innocents Abroad, categorized the area as a country devoid of people: “Palestine is a desolate country, whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds—a silent, mournful expanse. . . . We never saw a human being on the whole route. . . . There was hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive and cactus, those fast friends of worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”34 Twain, following in the footsteps of many nineteenth-­century travel writers on sojourns through the Middle East, did not like what he saw. The author’s touristic vision of Palestine as a terra nullius, unfavorably compared to the fertile United States, is not so innocent. In envisioning a barren land, he erases the people who were living there, a common trope of many writers and politicians.35 As Donna Haraway reminds us, “Vision is always a question of the power to see—and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices.”36 As a white male writer with financial means traveling through the Middle East while civil war raged in his home country, Twain’s visualizations implicitly conjured a view of land so uncared for that even shrubs and trees were abandoning it: in colonial logic, settlers would be necessary to bring the “rich” soil to its full potential. Zionists and the State of Israel have a unique view—compared to other Western liberal democracies—of the relationship between land and citizenship. The Zionist project in Israel is a settler-­colonial endeavor in which nationality derives not from birth in Israel but from a person’s Jewish nationality. Citizenship therefore depends not solely on territory or national borders but on a religious or ethnic affiliation.37 As Shira

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Robinson documents the plight of Palestinian Arabs who live in Israel in her book Citizen Strangers, this view of nationality allows for political exclusion and cements secondary citizenship status for all non-­Jewish nationals who live in Israel.38 Julie Peteet likens this secondary citizenship, which of course limits Palestinians’ physical and social mobility, to Jim Crow America—the more powerful are enacting restrictive forms of control. Also like Jim Crow policy, both legal and extralegal means are used to check the movement of those with less power.39 Settler colonialism is one way in which Israel polices and expands the reaches of its nation-­ state, by “settling” land through a violent state military apparatus that knows no hard national border. In 1998, while serving as foreign minister, Ariel Sharon, a proponent of Jewish settlement on Palestinian land—designated illegal by the United Nations—encouraged Zionists to “move, run and grab as many [Palestinian] hilltops as they can to enlarge the [ Jewish] settlements because everything we take now will stay ours. . . . Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”40 To expand the Jewish state, Sharon advocated colonizing the land and inhabiting it with Jewish “settlers” (again, conjuring images of a terra nullius).41 The land was an “empty” frontier that Zionists needed to “civilize.” For Saree Makdisi, this is an “architecture of erasure,” a politics built on securing a Jewish national identity by “an endless process of covering over, removing, or managing a stubbornly persistent Palestinian presence.”42 Central to Palestinian resistance, therefore, is a visible Palestine, one that contradicts Palestinians’ erasure. Edward Said wrote in Dreams of a Nation that “the whole history of the Palestinian struggle has to do with the desire to be visible.”43 Palestinians assert their presence through visualizing political practices that emphasize a “return” to the land they believe was stolen from them. Weizman, Robinson, Peteet, and Makdisi, among others, detail in their comprehensive works on the Israeli use of settler colonialism that conflict architecture in the West Bank erases Palestinian presence by controlling spaces and limiting mobility. Patrick Wolfe’s well-­known aphorism that “invasion is a structure not an event” is important to highlight here. The Separation Wall, constructed slowly over numerous years, physically represents Israeli colonial practices that are part of a “normalization” of the “invasion” onto Palestinian land that structurally imposes the state’s will. The border wall is an extension of other infrastructure that has been part of a Zionist move for expansion based on a rhetoric of security. For example, one such structure emerged during the 1936–1939 Palestinian revolt against the British authority’s support for the Balfour Declaration— the mandate creating “for Jewish people a home in Palestine secured

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by public law.” Palestinians demanded that Jewish settler expansion be halted; the revolt cost the lives of between two thousand and five thousand Arabs. During this time, Jewish settlers established more than fifty-­ seven settlements using the Homa U’Migdal settlement methodology.44 Translated loosely as “wall and tower,” these settlements were described “more as an instrument than a place”;45 settlers used an ancient Ottoman Empire law decreeing that no illegal building with a roof could be torn down. With a tremendous amount of speed (usually created within a few hours) and using prefabricated wooden molds, settlers would fence in a yard of thirty-­five by thirty-­five meters, enclosing an observation tower and four sheds that housed approximately forty settlers.46 The quickly built settlement “transforms the landscape into a battlefield, a scene of conflicts, a frontier—in fact, into a city.”47 The frontier outpost overlooking “uncivilized” land then after a time became a walled pseudocity controlled by Jewish settlers and under the protection of the Israeli state. Those settlement cities, in the years that followed, grew strong roots, leaving Palestinian towns systematically destroyed or withering away. As Oren Yiftachel, a professor of political and legal geography, states, “If early Zionism was indeed a colonial movement of the displaced seeking survival, its later version became a case of State colonialism.”48 Walls and towers were a key tool in this colonial project that has since grown exponentially, evolving today into the prefabricated concrete slabs and watchtowers of the Separation Wall. The Homa U’Migdal’s main architecture was a tower that allowed settlers to keep a Jeremy Bentham–­inspired eye on the land and a wall to keep enemies at bay. An architecture of settler-­induced visibility allows for the control of land—the settlements were usually within sight of one another and thus linked territory. For many Palestinians, the Israeli border wall is an extension of this type of architectural colonialism, combining both towers and walls in a permanent structure that has become the de facto border between Israel and Palestine. Both smaller walls and the larger Separation Wall attempt to make invisible Palestinians’ rights to their land. When Banksy painted his murals “disappearing” the wall and aesthetically imagining the land “on the other side” as an island paradise, he waded into a central issue of the Israeli-­Palestinian conflict. Even as a representation, the way that land is portrayed—and who is connected with that land—is a sociopolitical question of grave importance. In the Aida refugee camp, for example, the concrete walls surrounding the camp (and under the shadow of the Separation Wall looming close by) are painted by refugees. They depict the village they fled from and the one to which they wish to return. These faded murals, often crudely drawn, surround the refugees—a physical reminder of what actually is on the

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Zacakia mural at Aida refugee camp wall, near Beit Jala. Photo by John Lennon.

other side of the wall. The murals recount a distinct loss while also revealing a specific hope of Palestinians to return to their ancestral land. The refugees who painted these walls made aesthetic-­political choices when rendering their homes on the walls. The refugees’ murals are certainly different from Banksy’s humorous graffiti. They also reveal different aesthetic-­political choices from the residents of the Israeli settler encampment in Gilo who hired professionals to realistically draw Palestinian land and erase the people. During the Second Intifada, snipers from Beit Jala, a Christian Palestinian town, fired upon the Jewish settlers in Gilo, a town located in East Jerusalem. To protect the settlers, municipal leaders built a border wall to block sniper sight lines into the town. The settlers, however, resisted, as they saw the wall as an ineffective form of protection. More important, though, the wall blocked the view of the beautiful landscape (which includes the town of Beit Jala built into the opposite hilltop). To show their displeasure, the settlers defaced the wall built to protect them, using graffiti to visually argue against it. Municipal authorities were unsure how to respond—they built the wall to protect constituents, but they also wished to give settlers a view of the land that made living there desirable. They decided to do both: the authorities commissioned an “artistic replica of the disappearing view.”49 Essentially, the goal was to paint a Baudrillardian simulacrum of the

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landscape on the wall so townspeople could experience the environment while staying safe from sniper fire. The resulting socialist-­realist mural was poorly received and its implementation caused trouble. In an interview with me, Ruth Malul-­Zadka, director of the Jerusalem Artists House, explained that newly arrived Russian immigrants were commissioned to paint the wall because Israeli artists would have refused to take such an artistically abhorrent job.50 According to Malul-­Zadka, the Russian artists, desperate for money and underpaid for the project, were conflicted. On the one hand, they knew that replicating the natural view on the wall was a bad project; on the other hand, they wanted to show their commitment to their new adopted home by working on a project to keep settlers safe. When creating a replica of the land beyond the wall, however, they painted a landscape devoid of Palestinians. The land was empty of life, the people erased. As W. J. T. Mitchell states of the mural, “It shows with remarkable candor the long-­standing wish of many Israelis to simply ‘disappear’ the Palestinians along with the signs of their habitation.”51 The project, by all accounts, was poorly planned and executed (settlers continued to put graffiti on the wall even after the artwork was complete). Gilo’s mural, though, is an extension of the Zionist ideological foundation of erasure. The wall, a material-­grounded object that divides and blocks the landscape, is aesthetically rendered invisible while erasing the Palestinians who cultivated the land depicted in the mural. This painted barrier wall performs a colonial logic of expansion: the hilltops that “belong to them” (using Sharon’s words) are imaginarily empty and open to further Israeli settlement projects. The “disappeared” wall performs the ideological work of the Israeli state creating a Zionist imaginary landscape. Gilo’s mural and Banksy’s trompe l’oeil murals are different. Banksy spray-­painted not a social-­realist view of the landscape but a fantastical one—a palm-­lined vacation paradise. However, when he “disappeared” the Separation Wall, which systematically imposes violence on Palestinians, he also erased Palestinians. Although his political project presumably raises awareness of the wall’s violence, his imagined space is a Westernized vision that, like the socialist-­realist painters in Gilo, erases a people from their land. As Rebecca Gould powerfully writes of the Separation Wall’s symbolic and physical violence, “Bisecting houses and backyards, dividing families from each other, and radically restricting Palestinians’ freedom of movement, the wall ends by cutting through the self as powerfully as it bisects Palestinian land.”52 Gould argues that the wall, to paraphrase Patrick Wolfe, is not a onetime event but a structure of biopower. By placing beach and mountain scenes in his murals, Banksy’s

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work does not show this bisection of land and people; he elides the structure of the occupation in favor of fantasy. Banksy’s aesthetic choices are political choices that illustrate the limitations of the activist work his murals purportedly depict. These comparisons are not to deride Banksy but to take his work seriously as political art with ramifications in the overall conflict. It is helpful to compare how other artists in conflict areas think through these questions of land and erasure, even as they, too, “disappear” border walls. The Mexican artist Ana Teresa Fernández imagined a world without a border wall and created art installments that “disappear” sections of the border wall between the United States and Mexico. In her imagined spaces, the steel slats that separate the two countries disappear as the rusty bars are transfigured into a baby-­blue sky. Her first performance Borrando la frontera (Erasing the Border) was at the wall separating Mexico’s Playas de Tijuana from San Diego’s Border Field State Park.53 In this installation, Fernández climbed a ladder in a black cocktail dress and pumps, and, aided by a spray gun and brushes, painted a section of the wall blue. In numerous pictures and in firsthand reports, the blue paint ostensibly dissolves the slats, opening space, and making it seemingly possible to walk from one side of the beach to the other. Fernández recalls in an interview a moment when a person living in Mexico saw her artwork for the first time and remarked that he had never imagined the possibility of the wall’s erasure.54 By disappearing the wall, Fernández made physical a transformative idea that this person had not contemplated. Importantly, Fernández’s art project was also a feminist performance; by wearing the cocktail dress, she highlighted the border as a space to which women from Mexico, Central America, and South America have traveled, often working in maquiladoras, striving for a more economically stable future.55 Fernández’s performative art shows that borders have violent, gendered consequences; by erasing the wall, she is not erasing the people or the land but restoring the bifurcated land back to the people hurt by the wall. Fernández herself passed through the border, earning a college degree, a master’s degree in fine arts, and a career in the United States. In Borrando la frontera, her murals imaginatively create an open border for others to transverse (plate 10). The work hit a nerve for many, garnering attention and community participation. She has continued to collectively paint border walls in subsequent years, including a three-­pronged “attack” on the wall on April 9, 2016: Fernández and other artists, activists, and community members erased three more sections of the wall in Mexicali, Baja California; Agua Prieta, Sonora; and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Expertly matching the paint with the sky above their heads, Fernández

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again focused on the imagined spaces beyond the border; in doing so, she says, she hoped to reignite people’s imagination, “allowing them to see what the public space would look and feel like if jail bars didn’t run down the beach and separate the ocean.”56 Unlike Banksy’s work, Fernández’s art isn’t a punch line. The border wall creates a wound, to use Gloria Anzaldúa’s poignant phrase, between the two countries. Fernández’s artwork metaphorically cauterizes the wound with sky-­blue paint. Her intersectional feminist performances are not solitary experiences but part of an ongoing project that relies on a community collectively restoring passage to a land that, as Norma E. Cantú writes, has always been there, since the earth was created, but whose barrier wall only recently severed it.57 By dissolving the border wall, Fernández restores unfettered access. Ana Teresa Fernández’s Borrando la frontera project can be read only as a political statement against the wall. Banksy’s Bethlehem murals, which have a popular second life on the internet, are still primarily read as part of the Banksy brand. For this reason, entrepreneurs in Bethlehem can cut Banksy’s murals out of walls, selling them at auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Fernández’s project, however, works only on the border wall itself. As Ana Ball states, the media celebrated Banksy’s travels to the West Bank as political resistance with “his physical and artistic touch upon the wall serving as a form of transnational and experiential empathy.” With his border wall graffiti, though, he gave himself the authority to represent and translate the Palestinian experience. His philanthropic impulses became intertwined and overshadowed by his brand publicity. For Ball, “it would seem that something eluded [Banksy’s] grasp; not the ability to touch but the ability to be touched by the border in a way that might engender an empathetic visual intimacy with its spatial experience for the Palestinian subject.”58 Unlike Fernández’s artwork, which engages the viewer with the politics of the border wall, Banksy’s brand supersedes the politics opposed to Israeli policy, and the Separation Wall becomes simply a background to the art. The wall is erased, but the brand remains.

international graffiti tourists Banksy’s West Bank murals do not show the bisection of the land but rather paint a Western imaginary self into the metadiscussion of the wall. As often happens when star power and name recognition become the focal point of political art, this discussion can become a monologue, with Palestinian voices minimized or silenced. David Hanauer points to the vast amount of graffiti highlighting the Israeli-­US partnership in his analysis of the graffiti on the Separation Wall, categorizing it as “the Americanization of the wall.”59 In his view, the wall becomes less about

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its impact on Palestinian lives; instead, the focus is on US foreign policy. Palestinians are not actors in the struggle for their independence but victims and bystanders. This graffiti, like Banksy’s artwork, calls attention to injustices against Palestinian people. The focus, though, is on American involvement, not on Palestinians or their homeland.60 There is no doubt, of course, that the Israeli-­Palestinian conflict is global. Israel accepts $38 billion a year from the United States,61 and Palestinian resistance relies on international exposure, including the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement that works to end international investment in Israel. As John Collins states, “Palestine is increasingly characterized by references to transnational processes such as militarization, racialization, capital accumulation, ‘states of exception,’ biopolitics and a range of power/knowledge structures” so that “the global importance of Palestine seems to be increasing in inverse proportion to the amount of territory controlled by Palestine.”62 The internationalization of the conflict (embedded in the DNA of the conflict itself ) often overshadows the material object of the wall, a physical architectural entity that affects in immediate ways those who live in the disputed borderlands.63 It is this question of land—and who has rights to it—on which the conflict centers. The conflict, though, continues to be internationalized. The center does not hold as conversations begin to drift. The Banksy phenomenon is part of the globalizing glare of the conflict. Banksy is a British star whose spotlight on the wall will inevitably contain his Western origins. His images circulate among international activists and art lovers alike; the images often become more recognizable than whatever situation the image may (or may not) highlight. The painful experience of Palestinians living in the wall’s shadow becomes secondary to the art itself, or as Ashley Toenjes states, the realities of the wall become “the objectified backgrounds in the stories of named and important Western actors.”64 Traveling graffiti writers do not have a lived understanding of the conflict; consequently, the arts’ politics become universalist messages of hope and peace. According to Gould, the graffiti tourist writers’ “universalist ontology of freedom” marginalizes the quotidian Palestinian experience of biopower. These expressions render the wall a metaphor rather than revealing the wall’s actual violence upon Palestinians. Gould writes that “when symbols of local oppression are rendered in this universalist idiom, they tend to be homogenized under an international message that often fails to connect with the local realities.”65 In other words, quoting John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” on the wall is a nice sentiment, but it does not speak to the Palestinian realities of life under occupation. The eliding of specific injustices by the Israeli state into palatable universal ideals

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is not, of course, exclusive to tourist graffiti; the complicated routes of international solidarity have been a focus of study among peace scholars and activists in general, and specifically within the Palestinian debate. Islah Jad, for example, has termed this the NGOization of Palestine, where international activists (and donors) co-­opt the Palestinian liberation movement to reflect their own ideological agendas.66 Or, as Gargi Bhattacharyya bluntly states, there is “a lot of talk about Palestine without much attention to the situation of Palestinians.”67 Western voices dominate the narrative being portrayed on the wall. It is, after all, mostly the graffiti by these international writers that circulates in the media, and, in Banksy’s case, it is his images that become the recognizable resistive symbolism to the wall. This symbolism is also framed by the popular graffiti and street-­art culture that Banksy has helped create. Graffiti “fame” has always been built on two main foundations—the amount of graffiti one produces and the level of perceived difficulty of getting a work up. Banksy has been painting for decades; his fame itself is a testament to his longevity. Placing his writing on the Separation Wall as armed Israeli soldiers (in theory at least) are in the guard towers certainly gives him added credibility. Graffiti culture is, after all, a primarily “macho” culture that judges writers by skills and fearlessness.68 This machismo appears not only in the artwork that Banksy creates but also in how he frames his art. For example, in Wall and Piece Banksy tells two stories about painting the Separation Wall. In one, he recounts the story of the older man who told him to stop painting “beautiful” images on a wall that causes so much physical and psychological harm to Palestinians. In the other, Banksy writes of how his friends who organized the trip to Bethlehem explained to him only after the fact that he was in potentially grave danger, laughing that there were armed guards in the tower observing him the entire time. Again, Banksy walks a fine line that he has perfected in his public relations stunts: in the first recounted story, he shows that he is self-­aware of his outsider status and the negative ways his art may be perceived by the local population (although, importantly, this doesn’t stop him). Simultaneously, in his second story, he gains fame for “getting up”—he can outwit not only police but armed soldiers as well. Does the wall’s graffiti, then, become more centrally known as part of the graffiti or street-­art world, with the border wall a “prime spot” for graffiti kings, or is it read politically as a resistance to Israeli policy? Nigel Parry, writing for the Electronic Intifada when Banksy’s pieces were first placed on the Separation Wall in 2005, is emphatic to the point of hyperbole about the artist’s political significance: “Banksy is the anti–­Leni Riefenstahl and anti–­Richard Wagner reclaiming public spaces as a space

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for public imagination and enlightenment where they have become propagandistic barriers to thought and awareness. . . . Banksy’s summer project on Israel’s Wall stands out as one of the most pertinent artistic and political commentaries in recent memory.”69 There is no discounting that Banksy has raised international awareness of the Separation Wall, but, because of the murals’ universalist message, is this awareness tethered to the artist rather than the conflict? Banksy’s brand is so encompassing that it can even erase other artists’ interventions in completely different conflict zones. For example, the young artist Murad Subay was labeled the “Banksy of Yemen” by media outlets such as Ozy and Al Jazeera after some of his political art highlighting the Yemeni civil war circulated on the internet in 2012.70 Subay, working in various mediums and styles, including brushes, stencils, wheat paste, and mixed media, is known for his quirky, boldly colored graffiti. There is a passing resemblance to Banksy’s work, although any resemblance disappears under careful analysis. Categorizing Subay’s political work under the all-­encompassing Banksy brand undercuts the important interventions Subay makes in his own political campaigns that are specific to Yemen’s situation. Subay’s art physically intervenes in his country’s civil war, which is also a proxy war between intervening international actors. For example, on May 18, 2015, Subay painted twenty-­seven flowers on a ruined wall in Bani Hawat, an area close to the historical and most populous Yemini city of Sana’a (or at least before the civil war decimated the city), where twenty-­ seven people, including fifteen children, were killed by aerial bombings (plate 11).71 Subay marked each death with simple individual portraits of twenty-­seven framed flowers each with a black band through the upper left corner, drawn by two children—a shorter boy in blue shorts and a black shirt and a taller girl in black pants and a red shirt. Although Banksy often uses images of children in his work, in Subay’s Bani Hawat drawings, there is neither a punch line nor a hint of irony. Instead, the mural directly comments on the bombings of the first day of Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen’s civil war. Subay has continued to create political artwork throughout Yemen, and his work in his Ruins project places viscerally raw images on damaged walls. In Death by Hunger and Disease, in which Subay stenciled a coffin with a child inside, he drew an umbilical cord with a barbed wire.72 His Family Photo, drawn on the insides of a house destroyed by aerial bombing, shows a crooked photo of a Muslim family smiling out at viewers. At the frame’s top right is a crow, which tips the picture even farther off kilter.73 By painting the walls beset by violence, Subay calls attention to the real lives lost in a conflict that has displaced 2.5 million people,

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Family Photo, wall of destroyed building, Yemen. Artwork and photo by Murad Subay.

forcing men, women, and children to become refugees, driven from their land by the military and the threat of bombs falling from the sky. His political artwork focuses on those who have become erased—through death or political disappearance. Subay’s art can be understood as a form of witnessing as well as a political action, as seen in his blunt comment categorizing his political art campaigns: “So, what can we do? Just this: Not remain silent, commemorate the innocent people who have been killed, and highlight the cost of this war.”74 Subay’s art visually restores the people and land that is, as the artist states, the actual “cost” of the violent conflicts that envelop his country. Three years before his Ruins campaign, in September 2012, the artist began a project he titled The Walls Remember Their Faces, in which he and his collaborators painted portraits of more than one hundred kidnapped or killed Yemenis. It was a bold project that, when placed in dialogue with Banksy’s Bethlehem murals, emphasizes how Banksy’s ironic humor erases rather than focuses attention on the marginalized community he highlights. Like Subay did for his first campaign, Color the Walls of Your Street, the artist announced the start of the project on Facebook, where he asked for volunteers to help him paint. The goal was to spray-­ paint the images of those disappeared at the hands of the governments of former North and South Yemen, as well as by the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh. Alongside the spray-­painted images, in both English and Arabic, the names of the disappeared are listed. To create this project, Subay, who did not know how to use stencils, researched how to create them on the internet before beginning his campaign.75 Subay feared that he, too, would be disappeared, as the military, sus-

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pected to be the main perpetrator of violence, was a constant presence in the streets of Sana’a. As Subay stated of the risks involved: “It’s a sensitive issue for them. . . . It makes them fearful. The eyes of those who disappeared watch the killers, the officials with blood-­soaked hands, right in front of their houses.”76 Subay embodies his drawings with “eyes” that “watch”; his images on the wall take on a life of their own. The project, like many of Subay’s political pieces, was a collaboration. Volunteers, many of whom were related to or knew the disappeared, not only helped create the murals but also, as Alviso-­Marino states, created a community of voices who could give information about their loved ones, sharing stories of those kidnapped or killed: “They commented and exchanged information about their own disappeared family members, participated in arguments with the military present in the streets and became agents in the process of finding more information about the whereabouts of their family members or acquaintances.”77 Like Ana Teresa Fernández’s art on the US-­Mexican border, Subay’s art was a multifaceted, loud community voice of resistance. The work was produced by the local collective, sharing a communal identity. The inclusion of the disappeared family members in the project and coverage by the press, who often followed along to snap pictures, were key reasons Subay was not arrested by Yemeni security forces.78 The campaign was popular, placing a spotlight on the kidnappings of political dissidents. Subay’s art, far from erasing its subjects, conjures the disappeared onto the walls of his city. These murals were not abstract drawings but drawings of real men who had suffered at the hands of a brutal regime, and the community used this collaborative effort to demand change. Collectively dealing with their grief, they were able to exert (some) political clout, forcing the creation of a special committee to investigate these cases of the disappeared and gaining the attention of Yemen’s human rights minister.79 The spotlight on victims also produced another impact: it helped locate those who were missing. In the early 1980s, Mathar al-­Iriani was a member of the activist group the Revolutionary Democratic Party of Yemen. He was arrested by state representatives of Yemen’s former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, and it was presumed he had been tortured to death. However, in 2012, an activist working with Subay’s mural project called al-­Iriani’s brother-­in-­law to request a photo of the man his family had not seen in thirty years. After more conversations and following leads, the picture was shown in a retirement home in the western city of Hodeidah, where Mathar al-­Iriani was discovered to be alive. When found and reunited with his family, he was suffering from amnesia, hemiplegia, and partial paralysis, and prone to screaming fits directed at Colonel Ali Abdullah Saleh and Colonel al-­Halali (Saleh’s director of security).80 Although

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a tragic (partial) ending to the Walls Remember Their Faces project, as Alviso-­Marino summarizes, “The result was a campaign that, initiated by a painter, gave rise to an unintended collective action with consequences never initially imagined.”81 Hala al-­Qarshi, whose father was arrested and disappeared in 1978, stated, “We feel now that their pictures on the walls speak.”82 By “remembering” the faces of the actual disappeared, the walls articulated the violence that was enacted on large segments of the population and resulted in collective community engagement. Although branded as the “Banksy of Yemen,” Subay approaches his art differently than the British street artist does. It is hard to read Subay’s work, though, outside the orbit of Banksy’s brand; the pull is too great. This is also true for Palestinian graffiti. Much like Zionists who saw Palestine as an empty land devoid of people, many articles allude to Banksy “bringing graffiti to the West Bank,” ignoring the richly varied graffiti tradition that existed before he ever traveled to the Middle East. Prior to Banksy’s and other graffiti tourists’ setting foot in the West Bank, Palestinian graffiti were not a “brand” but a communicative device for ordinary Palestinians who used graffiti in resistance to Israeli occupation—a crucial fact that is rarely mentioned when discussing Banksy’s Separation Wall graffiti. In the Israeli-­Palestinian conflict, graffiti played an important role that affected the area in direct ways. Banksy—and the graffiti tourists who have come after him to write on the wall—need to be placed in the larger context of Palestinian graffiti.

palestinian graffiti A major wave of graffiti writing spread across the Occupied Territories during the First Intifada (1987–1993). Palestinian graffiti, written by and for Palestinians, specifically show how West Bank graffiti were not only a representation of, or metaphor for, the violence under occupation but an integral part of the communicative media tasked with combating it. As a form of communication, graffiti defied erasure, visualizing Palestinian voices. According to Julie Peteet, a cultural anthropologist who offered one of the first and most inventive discussions of graffiti during the intifada, “Graffiti did not merely send messages or signal defiance; their mere appearance gave rise to arenas of contest in which they were a vehicle or agent of power.”83 While Banksy’s murals offer a fantastical representation of the space beyond the walls, intifada graffiti was part of the cultural production of Palestinian resistance. The bloody First Intifada led to the death of 1,100 Palestinians and 120,000 injuries; approximately 400 Israelis died and 3,100 were injured.84 The intifada began on December 9, 1987, when an Israeli Defense

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Force (IDF) vehicle struck another vehicle in the Jabalia refugee camp, killing four Palestinians. Tensions over land rights and Palestinian mobility, though, had been steadily rising for years.85 A protest movement formed that involved both civil disobedience and violent physical resistance. Images of keffiyeh-­wearing, stone-­throwing youths are popular images of the intifada. Civil disobedience was equally a part of their resistance, consisting of numerous tactics: general strikes, street barricades to prevent the IDF from entering, refusal to pay taxes, and even hiding cows from Israeli officials.86 One tool of this civil disobedience was graffiti. As Peteet states, “Indeed it was a war of stones, but stones were more than weapons of defense: they were print weapons as well.”87 In the years before social media or smartphones, graffiti presented outward resistance to the Israeli state while simultaneously acting as an internal Palestinian communications system. It was not, therefore, a monolithic phenomenon; instead, graffiti revealed civil disobedience’s complexity, exposing internal fractures among political and socioreligious factions. Graffiti were a visual intervention against Israeli authority, with a practical, informational side as well as an idealistic one, imagining (sometimes different) futures. Like a bevy of newspapers competing in a metropolitan area, each with its own ideological slant, the graffiti placed on private homes, businesses, and streets needed to be updated throughout the night so that walls could be read the next day to spur specific actions. And much like a newspaper, there was editorial control, with leadership from various political and religious factions attempting to regulate the graffiti presented to the public. The Palestine Liberation Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Unified National Leadership, the Palestine Communist Party, Fatah, and Hamas were all united in their opposition to Israel. They had, though, different methods and imagined futures. The infighting was both political as well as personal; for example, there were numerous graffiti conversations about the role of women in the intifada, including the clothes they should wear.88 Graffiti thus merged the political and personal, informative and commemorative, threatening and humorous. Intifada graffiti actively resisted the occupation, revealing the messy politics of uniting voices within a colonized space. Settler-­colonial states police and limit the mobility of marginalized people; they must also control and regulate the flow of ideas. These “stone conversations” were dangerous to Israel because they visually argued against the occupation. More than 1,500 military orders regulated Palestinians’ day-­to-­day lives; one of those orders was that no Palestinian living in the West Bank or Gaza could publicly write and disseminate anything

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before it was approved by Israeli censors.89 Intifada graffiti resisted violent biopower and censorship; to write graffiti was illegal and could lead to arrest or death. Consequently, writing graffiti was a way to show loyalty to the Palestinian cause, particularly allowing new members to actively participate in the rebellion. For example, Peteet explains the way older Palestinian women assimilated a young Palestinian schoolteacher into the revolution by having her sneak away from her parent’s home at night to write graffiti. Spray-­painting revolutionary slogans under the cover of night was a way to prove commitment to the Palestinian cause.90 In this way, the young woman turned away from her family’s private wishes and, through graffiti, joined with others in public resistance. Graffiti came under IDF scrutiny, with soldiers forcing Palestinian youth to paint over it (or, using a jeep fitted with a spray gun, do it themselves). Israeli policy also compelled Palestinians to police themselves— any graffiti found on a home or business could result in a fine of 750 shekels (approximately US$350). Additional graffiti would sometimes appear on the same house or business that already had graffiti with an anonymous “warning” from a Palestinian group demanding the owners not “voluntarily” remove revolutionary graffiti. A proxy battle between the IDF and the various Palestinian political groups arose as private Palestinian walls became part of a complex, ongoing public resistance. Intifada graffiti was therefore not a free, anarchic expression of feelings—and that is an important difference between Banksy’s graffiti and Palestinian graffiti: one is a simplistic commentary on the situation in the West Bank from a “graffiti tourist” who leaves when his vacation is over, whereas the other shows the complexities of living under occupation with competing factions fighting to control one’s own actions. The first is figuratively representative, the other is primarily about intervention.91 Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation has evolved since the late 1980s and early 1990s, and graffiti’s role in the Occupied Territories has obviously changed as well.92 Almost thirty years after she wrote her groundbreaking article on intifada graffiti, Peteet argued that graffiti is no longer an essential part of Palestinian resistance. In the present day, when there is graffiti in the West Bank, there is “no Israeli response to this writing, no speeding jeeps full of soldiers come to blacken it out and possibly arrest the authors.”93 One particular reason for the Israeli state allowing graffiti is the Banksy effect.94 As cities around the world embrace street art and governments from across the political spectrum financially back street-­art programs, graffiti as a tool of political resistance has been dulled (something I analyze in the next two chapters). James C. Scott details in Weapons of the Weak that the oppressed are

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always changing tactics in order to survive and resist. This is certainly true of Palestinians. Graffiti were an important part of the struggle during the First Intifada but more recently graffiti has not held a prominent place among the resistance. Much of the anti–­Separation Wall activity has been direct, bodily resistance with mass protests and weekly marches. For example, the Palestinian Anti-­Apartheid Wall Campaign has created fifty-­four popular committees to tacitly organize against the wall; it helps coordinate weekly demonstrations in villages in Bil’in, Ni’lin, Budrus, and al-­Ma’sara.95 These weekly demonstrations pre­sent opposition to the wall in bodily ways—and the Israelis’ responses with tear gas and rubber bullets are part of the weekly performance of Israel reasserting its state biopower.96 There are also international demonstrations with Anarchists Against the Wall and Ta’ayush—Israeli activists fighting for Palestinian rights—participating in various actions and “co-­resisting” (rather than coexisting) the Israeli state.97 Interestingly, not one group explicitly details graffiti use as a tactic against Israeli occupation. I interviewed Renen Raz, an active Israeli member in the weekly demonstrations against the wall until his death in 2016.98 Raz spoke of the Israeli erasure of Palestinians. His physical demonstrations against the wall (he was often arrested and was injured multiple times during the demonstrations) concretized the Palestinian struggle, showing solidarity with the men and women on the other side of the wall. When I asked Raz about graffiti as a form of political resistance, he looked at me blankly— a response I received numerous times when I interviewed activists who had participated in actions against the wall. Although they knew about Banksy and other international graffiti writers, I interpreted their lack of interest as their view of graffiti as an empty gesture of international solidarity. For the activists I interviewed, the wall needed to be taken down, not made into an art gallery. Their stares (and sometimes overt annoyance at my questions) reminded me of the old Palestinian man who told Banksy to go home and stop making the object of their oppression beautiful. These types of responses are not meant to discount Banksy’s art, or even to question his desire to help Palestinians. Banksy’s art does shed international light on a desperate situation. Banksy’s murals introduced the Separation Wall (even if as mere background to art) to many people around the globe interested in graffiti but without knowledge about Israeli-­Palestinian relations. Seeing the wall, then, might have led them to reconsider some of their preconceived notions of why the wall is there. Palestinian resistance is about making visible Palestinians’ existence, and Banksy’s art certainly does cast a light on this area that might have remained in complete darkness for many people in the West.

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Watchtower swing set mural, donkey and cart, Gaza. Banksy.

banksy ’ s evolution? Always playing the jokester, Banksy and his evolving art suggest an understanding of the limits to what his art can do for the Palestinian cause. His more recent works have changed, speaking more directly to Palestinian lived experience. In 2015, after a massive Israeli bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip, titled Operation Protective Edge, Banksy again focused his spotlight on the Palestinian cause. In an uploaded viral video, we see Banksy (or someone we think is Banksy) allegedly traveling through secret tunnels to enter Gaza (again, borders are always shown to be porous).99 He created in Gaza various murals on some of the many bombed-­out buildings that had been destroyed in the Israeli campaign, bringing greater international attention to the conflict. There are, certainly, issues with Banksy’s Gaza “tour.” In the video he uploaded, he included images of checkpoints, which are not present in Gaza, and his inaccuracy shows that he collapsed the different regions of the Palestinian struggle into one digestible bit. This is obviously problematic. However, the way he frames the Gaza murals on his website shows a slightly different narrative arc from the one we see in his earlier work within this conflict.100 In a small mural on a wall in Gaza, Banksy painted a watchtower magically transformed into a children’s playground; the tower is the base for kids to swing from. It is a “classic” Banksy—the art brings together two opposing ideas: the panopticon surveillance system and innocent children at play. The difference is that on his website, Banksy included a caption: “Gaza is often described as ‘the world’s largest open air prison’ because no one is allowed to enter or leave. But that seems a bit unfair to prisons—they don’t have their electricity and drinking water cut off ran-

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domly almost every day.” Framing the joke, the punch line here is intentionally unfunny; more important, it adds specific information about the Israeli use of biopower to control Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.101 As opposed to the generic “water rights” of his show Barely Legal, here Banksy is including a specific form of colonialism that affects Palestinians in their day-­to-­day lives. Instead of imagining fantastical worlds beyond the wall, the art and its framing places viewers within the Gaza “prison” and short of basic needs, illustrating the Palestinian struggle for land and visibility. Banksy also framed his travels to Gaza as a tongue-­in-­cheek tourism promo with the title “Make This the Year You Discover a New Destination.”102 But as he did with the children swinging around the tower, in the video, he responds to each of his cheeky bits of ad copy with some deadly information. For example, over images of young children playing in the rubble of the air strikes, the ad states “The locals like it so much, they never leave,” then dissolves into an image of armed IDF soldiers in front of (non-­Banksy) wall graffiti. The response to the ad copy is placed in parentheses: “(Because they’re not allowed to).” Throughout the short video, just under two minutes, Banksy continues this call-­and-­response with his “funny” lines being undercut by images of the harsh realities of Palestinians under occupation, as well as his straightforward parenthetical “responses.” The ad culminates with an older Palestinian man staring at Banksy’s large cat on a bombed-­out door “playing” with a “ball” of twisted metal debris. In Arabic, he explains his interpretation: “This cat tells the whole world that she is missing joy in her life. . . . The cat found something to play with. What about our children?” Here the Palestinians are not erased but instead narrate how Banksy’s art should be read. At the close of the video, a Paulo Freire quote makes a pointed accusation to the viewer: “If we wash our hands of the conflict between the Powerful and the Powerless, we side with the Powerful. We don’t remain neutral.” Interrelating images of his murals with the lived reality of Palestinians, Banksy calls attention to Gaza’s destruction by giving (a limited) voice to the Palestinians themselves, challenging the viewer to not remain neutral in the conflict. Palestinians have responded to this particular work. In “After Banksy: The Parkour Guide to Gaza,” uploaded to YouTube in March 2015, Abdallah Al-­Qassab narrates the “Gaza Parkour” team’s response to Banksy specifically and to Israeli colonialism more generally. As bombs from Operation Protective Edge explode onto the beach in the distance, we see the parkour team performing stunts in the forefront. With the Palestinian hip-­hop artist Shadia Mansour playing in the background, Al-­ Qassab narrates the harsh life of Palestinians (water shortages, unem-

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Cat with pink bow mural, children, rubble, Gaza. Banksy.

ployment, inability to travel), but as they do tricks off of Banksy’s cat and watchtower graffiti, they also reveal that they are present, alive, and resisting in body and spirit. Interacting with Banksy’s graffiti, they add to it with their own bodies, twisting and jumping from the damaged structures. Jennifer Kelly, highlighting the politics of invitation and the “right” to tourism, argues that the parkour team’s response was not a complete rebuke to Banksy but offers an extended, more complete picture of life in Gaza than Banksy’s images and videos do.103 Banksy’s activist-­inspired art has evolved since his first Santa’s Ghetto project in Bethlehem in 2005. No longer a tourist in the West Bank, he is now part of the hotel business, opening the Walled Off Hotel in 2016. Joking that it has the “worst view in the world,” the hotel is literally a few feet from the Separation Wall, with its front windows open to the graffiti-­ covered wall. Banksy reportedly told British Channel 4 News, “Walls are hot right now, but I was into them long before Trump made it cool.”104 Instead of “erasing” the wall as he does in his trompe l’oeil murals, Banksy uses the visuals of the wall as the hotel’s selling point. More than a joke, though, the Walled Off Hotel is an actual functioning hotel with a local Palestinian man, Wissam Salsa, running the operations. Inside the “colonial decadent-­styled” hotel are numerous Banksy murals throughout the bedrooms, dining rooms, and foyer. There is a plethora of options for accommodation, including the presidential suite (running at over $700 per night) to more modestly priced shared rooms with bunkbeds ($60 dollars per night). The Walled Off Hotel is part of Banksy’s more recent expansive performance art. Dismaland, a 2.5-­acre seafront site in Weston-­super-­Mare, England, temporarily featured “attractions” by fifty-­eight handpicked artists

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(and ten by Banksy himself ) that celebrate “entry-­level anarchism” and contained, in turn, funny and shocking scenes of destruction (in one, Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage is involved in a horrific and deadly crash).105 Dismaland celebrates universalist decay; while specific attractions speak to current political issues (for example a boat ride containing refugees), the “land” is not specific to any particular conflict or place. Like Disneyland, Banksy’s fantasy land is a mythical place where dreams come true—only the dreams are mostly the stuff of nightmares. The Walled Off Hotel, however, is a business venture that embraces the role of disaster tourism with its ironic twist. Far from erasing the land and the people, the hotel is situated in the physical land and employs local Palestinians; to get the “joke,” one has to be present in this area of conflict. Much like the locally owned Stars & Bucks coffee shop right off Bethlehem’s town square, the Walled Off Hotel plays with a famous chain’s name but then offers guests something different. While resisting overly didactic commentary, the hotel’s website focuses on the wall’s illegality. For example, in response to how long the hotel will remain, the website states that the hotel will be there at least until 2017, because that “marks a hundred years since the British took control of Palestine and helped kick start a century of confusion and conflict” (as of 2021, the hotel was still presently in operation).106 Banksy locates the centennial violence at the feet of the British Empire, explicitly referencing the conflict’s geopolitical and historical roots. Although some of the Banksy pieces inside the hotel point to a variety of Banksy’s more universalist themes, the pieces work as a whole because of their location within the hotel. As if to guard against those who think Banksy is an entrepreneur making money off of his brand, according to his website, all profits are returned to the local community. A gallery in the hotel has the works of Palestinian artists for sale, again bringing funds to local artists (much as he did in the first Santa’s Ghetto show, when he also sold local artists work). Banksy’s Separation Wall murals brought international attention to the wall—and to Banksy himself. A decade after placing those images (many of which are still there), a “Banksy” hotel opened for business— again putting a spotlight on the wall. The hotel, though, has not been happily received by all Palestinians, and this capitalistic enterprise certainly has ethical complications. But like much of Banksy’s work, the artist does not seem to care for the minutiae of the reception: overall, his artwork forces a double take and the Walled Off Hotel, certainly works in a similar way. A particular ethical hurdle concerns writing graffiti on the Separation Wall. As an added bonus, visitors staying in the hotel can buy stencils and spray paint from the gift shop, whereupon they are given a ladder to

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place messages on the wall. For visitors who are unsure whether placing graffiti on the Separation Wall is the “right thing to do;” the hotel’s website engages the ethics of the act: “Some people don’t agree with painting the wall and argue anything that trivializes or normalizes its existence is a mistake. Then again, others welcome any attention brought to it and the ongoing situation.” In essence, then, the website states that one can paint it but avoid anything “normal” or “trivial.”107 The reasoning is very Banksyesque—painting the wall is OK as long as it is outside the parameters of “normal.” Ethics, apparently, is a question of aesthetic extraordinariness. The website belies the tension between art produced for social change and art that becomes a “cool,” normalizing feature of the wall—a tension present in Banksy’s work since he first toured the West Bank in 2005. Regardless of the intent of the person writing, when graffiti becomes intertwined in the capitalistic enterprise of a functional hotel, does it normalize the conflict? Banksy’s brand is built on making fun of capitalism while also benefiting from it. Numerous Palestinians who own businesses in the shadow of the wall must also decide how to interact with the wall in their everyday lives. Joseph Hazboun, for example, is the proprietor of Bahamas Seafood Restaurant in Bethlehem. When the wall was placed directly in front of his business, he was forced to close, but after living in the United States for a few years, Hazboun returned and reopened his restaurant. Instead of trying to minimize the wall, however, he featured it. He painted his menu on one section of the wall as an advertisement, and he renamed his southern extension the “Wall Lounge.”108 For practical and entrepreneurial reasons, Hazboun uses the wall as part of his business. A significant question raised by Banksy’s hotel, Hazboun’s restaurant, and others who feature the wall as part of their businesses— such as taxi drivers who have placed their phone numbers on the wall—is whether they are normalizing it into their quotidian lives, thus making the wall permanent. When the Walled Off Hotel regularly pro­jects football matches onto the wall, is it another way that Israeli biopower has become ingrained in the daily lives of the residents?109 Not all Palestinians have, therefore, been happy with the hotel. When Banksy threw a mock “street party” to celebrate the Balfour decision’s centennial in front of the Walled Off Hotel (which included an engraved section of the wall by the queen that stated, “Er, sorry”), some residents from the Aida refugee camp rejected the ironic “celebration.” Planting a large Palestinian flag in the middle of a cake, the activist Munther Amira stated, “We came because we didn’t like the use of the British flags or the way they were using Palestinian children.”110 Banksy was placing his ironic glare on the hundred-­year anniversary (celebrated “with pride” by

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Bricked Banksy, Separation Wall. Photo by Kelly Lam.

British prime minister Theresa May and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a few miles away), but by using Palestinian children as part of the “joke,” did the party exploit the Palestinian struggle?111 Because this is Banksy, a bevy of questions arise: Did the children get Banksy’s political humor, or were they just there for the dessert? Or was the whole performance staged so that Palestinians were able to have a voice by exerting their flag into the colonizer’s “celebration”? Was Banksy, the master manipulator of the public relations stunt, offering his cake so Palestinians could eat it too? Palestinians have been responding directly to Banksy’s work from his first foray as a graffiti tourist.112 For example, locals reacted creatively to his 2005 Separation Wall mural with the two armchairs before a window depicting a beautiful mountain scenery. Painting bricks over the window, they “restored” the wall to the original form. Rejecting imagined worlds, the “rebricked” wall showed the reality they lived in—a world of walls and towers, exploitation and biopower. Ronen Eidelman made the salient point that the aesthetic quality of the border wall art can be “attractive [only] for artists who do not have to live with the results.”113 Palestinians remixing of Banksy’s work restores a strong political message. The defacement of Banksy’s art reminds us that representational politics must always be checked with the lived politics of those in the conflict zone.

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Pope graffiti on Separation Wall. Photo by Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk.

Palestinians used graffiti to rebuke the most glorified street artist in the world. They have also used spray paint to reframe the message of the pope. Both use graffiti to restore a Palestinian voice. When Pope Francis sojourned on his first official trip to the Holy Land as pontiff in May 2014, he made a highly publicized stop at the Separation Wall. In numerous pictures, the then seventy-­eight-­year-­old pontiff, in his bright white cassock, placed a hand against the wall to pray. The wall, though, is not blank. Above his hand and to his right are the words in English, “Welcome Pope, we need some 1 to speak about justice / Bethlehem look like the Warsaw ghetto.” On his lower left are other phrases in Arabic and English. At the bottom left are the words in English “Apartheid Wall.”114 For this historic visit, the pope’s hands on the wall could be (and have been) read as a way to pray for universal peace and an ending to this deadly conflict.115 The graffiti, however, argue that the wall itself is an injustice built by the Israeli state. Prayers “for peace” defuse blame, but the graffiti near where the pope placed his hands are clearly accusatory. Concurrently, there is also a specific written demand: “Free Palestine” by tearing down the wall. The wall graffiti gives voice to Palestinians. The fact that both English and Arabic were used (and written by seemingly different hands) visualizes the political conflict in a way that is as messy as the writing on the wall—for example, one photo shows the writer of the “Welcome Pope . . .” graffiti on the shoulders of a companion in what seems like a last-­minute addition to the wall before the pope arrived.

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The wall’s graffiti became the voice of the oppressed, arguing against the Israeli border wall in the presence of a religious leader. A clearly written, spray-­painted “yjb ’an yasqut jadar alfasl aleunsari” (the apartheid wall must fall) in amateurish handwriting is fairly clear in its meaning. It does not erase land or people but demands action to erase the wall.

4 : FRAMING HURRICANE KATRINA graffiti and the “ new ” new orleans

Norman Rockwell’s 1964 civil rights painting The Problem We All Live With depicts Ruby Bridges being escorted into the formerly all-­white William Frantz Public School in New Orleans. The six-­year-­old girl, rigid in her white dress, holds a book and a ruler, staring straight ahead as she walks between four US marshals. The only indication of her nervousness is that she is perhaps rushing by walking a bit too closely to the marshals in front. On the wall of the school that she is passing are the juicy insides of an exploded tomato. Right behind and just above her head is the spray-­ painted word nigger. The painting illustrates an attempt to erase the word, but the black paint on the fading yellow wall is still ghostly ­present. Rockwell, who became famous for his Saturday Evening Post depictions of middle-­class white family celebrations, published this civil rights–­ inspired painting in Look, a biweekly progressive magazine that, among other important issues, depicted racial tensions in the American South. Rockwell’s painting of this historic moment shows a young girl’s bravery while walking across a racial red line, her physical safety certainly in doubt. The dialectical relationship between Ruby Bridges, the spray-­painted word nigger, and the tomato’s blood-­red juice speaks clearly to what is not depicted but is present even in its absence: the white men and women who have come to the school to yell at the girl and throw tomatoes. These angry white citizens represent another absent but no less present subject: the millions of white Americans desperately holding on to Jim Crow–­era race relations. The inflammatory word is categorical in its depiction of the young student, and the wall’s smeared red pulp violently threatens what may happen when one tries to break from the limits embodied by that racist epithet.

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Norman Rockwell, The Problem We All Live With, 1963. Norman Rockwell Museum Collections.

Rockwell, however, titled the painting inclusively as a “problem” that “all” must endure. The artist depicts the “solution” in the strong, straight backs of the white men, dressed in suits and nice shoes, who are there to protect Bridges. All participants will seemingly solve the “problem”— a Black child will put her body in danger, but (good) white men will protect her. Rockwell’s nostalgic belief in the white middle-­class dream that he depicted in the Saturday Evening Post, which Stephanie Coontz described brilliantly as “The Way We Never Were,” is supposed to counteract the tomato-­throwing citizens.1 The marshals, with their baggy suits, crumpled notes in their pockets, and a clearly visible wedding ring, can deliver the girl to safety. The Problem We All Live With universalizes the problem of racism; as the patriarchal white father figure, the federal government must treat the diseases endemic to local regions within the national body. But what of the cure? The graffiti’s erasure is not complete. The “problem” faced by “all” is not solved by white men or by the federal government’s intervention (notably, Rockwell’s painting erases Ruby’s mother, Lucille Bridges, who walked her daughter to school every day). Black bodies continue to endure the problem of systematic racism present in the underfunded, racially segregated schools that plague Louisiana generally and New Orleans specifically. Ruby Bridges stood squarely in the crosshairs of the national debate over Jim Crow laws, where the federal government stepped in because Louisiana officials lacked the political will to protect its Black citizens’ rights. But as the national spotlight

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drifted in the 1960s, poverty and racial prejudice in the schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods did not disappear. On the eve of Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana had the second highest poverty rate in the United States, with 37 percent of Black citizens living below the poverty line.2 In Orleans Parish, which includes the city of New Orleans, more than 23 percent of the region’s population lived in poverty.3 In the Lower Ninth Ward, the population of which was 98 percent African American or Black, 25 percent of the population earned less than $10,000 a year.4 Many in New Orleans were part of the working poor, eking out livings in the tourist market, with only 4 percent of families in New Orleans receiving cash welfare payments two years before Katrina.5 With poverty, there is a correlating hazard of drug use and violence, and pre-­Katrina New Orleans was considered one of the most violent cities in the country—the Big Easy was (mis)labeled the “murder capital” of the United States, and the Lower Ninth Ward the “murder capital of the murder capital.”6 In New Orleans, poor Black men and women were still living Rockwell’s “problem” almost fifty years after his painting was published in the pages of Look magazine. And then Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Fifty levee breaches drowned New Orleans, revealing the systemic racism and corruption that had left the city as a whole and specifically its Black population in grave danger.7 Suffering Black bodies were on full display to the nation and the world. Rockwell’s vision of the federal government as the white father figure was exposed for what it has always been: an inaccurate, nostalgic view of white supremacy. President George W. Bush’s congratulations of Michael Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), for doing a “heck of a job” as the people of New Orleans were dying was publicly contradicted by Kayne West’s live telethon indictment: “George Bush hates Black people.”8 Not only did the levees break, so did the thin veneer of racial equality that unevenly covers over the history of racism that is part and parcel of the (living) history of New Orleans sold every day to tourists who stagger around the Big Easy. As in the Rockwell painting, federal employees came to restore order. However, instead of marshals in baggy suits, Louisiana governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco deployed three hundred members of the National Guard and threatened: “These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well-­ trained, experienced, battle-­tested and under my orders to restore order in the streets. They have M-­16s and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.”9 Blanco’s inflammatory statement reflects war rhetoric, commanding soldiers who had fought in Iraq to “shoot and kill” in the waterlogged streets of New Orleans, framing the

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city not as one in need of rescue but as one of colonization. As Anthony Oliver-­Smith states, “Disasters are events that reveal the existing crises of social vulnerability” among citizens, and Blanco’s statements reveal a divide in New Orleans: poor Black men and women were what Annu Jalais terms “disposable citizens,” abandoned by the state unprepared to help the most vulnerable.10 Many of the Hurricane Katrina victims were considered and treated as criminals because of their skin color or the fact they were unable to leave the city. If a government’s first responsibility is to protect its people, in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, the United States and the state of Louisiana failed. Numerous documentaries, scholarly books, and first-­person testimonies conclusively show the systematic failures that accompanied the hurricane and how poor Black men and women bore the brunt of these failures. Neoliberal policies helped produce a “slow violence,” to use Rob Nixon’s well-­termed phrase,11 creating the environment for Katrina’s devastation. In the wake of the hurricane’s wide swath of ruin, many saw this violence for what it was: the result of free-­market privatization of public resources. For example, before the storm, the levee infrastructure was known to be insecure and in need of drastic repairs. Instead of rebuilding, the legislature cut infrastructure budgets and social services for the most vulnerable.12 Jordan Flaherty, a grassroots organizer, writes, “New Orleans was not devastated by a hurricane. . . . [T]he damage to New Orleans came from brutal negligence—a lack of planning and a stunningly slow response, created by a federal government that didn’t care about the people of New Orleans, and still doesn’t.”13 An editorial in the Melbourne Age highlighted this view, arguing that Hurricane Katrina exposed the catastrophic failure of neoliberal policies in the United States. The editorial, though, suggested that the country after Katrina “will be a nation that can instill hope among its poorest people, rebuild trust in its leaders and achieve equality among its races.”14 The Melbourne Age was, unfortunately, wrong. New Orleans has not rejected but has actually embraced neoliberal policies to rebuild and rebrand the city. For the Forbes writer Adriana Lopez, for example, “Hurricane Katrina depopulated an entire city, and gave New Orleans an opportunity to come back even better than before—with a more resilient community, a stronger economy, and a highly ranked business culture.”15 Knowingly or not, Lopez is celebrating the removal of a Black underclass to make way for “resilient” members left to grow the economy, with private-­public partnerships leading the way. As Vincanne Adams states: “These arrangements turned disaster recovery into a for-­profit endeavor that enabled private companies to obtain government relief funds while

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offering little accountability to the people for whom these funds were intended. . . . Recovery that should have taken a few years was turned into what locals called a ‘funeral that would not end.’”16 Put simply, the hurricane, as Doreen Piano poignantly explains, “cleaved the city’s historical timeline into a pre-­Katrina and post-­Katrina New Orleans.”17 Recovery, though, is an ambiguous term; it means something different to the single African American woman displaced to a FEMA trailer in the Lower Ninth Ward than it does to a wealthy building developer with sights on refurbishing an old warehouse in the Bywater neighborhood. In the post-­Katrina disaster of New Orleans, new conflicts emerged, ones anchored in the racial politics of the city’s history. Neoliberal policies favoring private investment over public good has led to a gentrifying of New Orleans. Graffiti tells this story of those displaced by the storm and replaced by gentrification. Like graffiti in conflict zones, these wall marks are more complicated than first imagined, revealing a devastated city recovering in uneven ways. When hurricanes hit an area, they do so indiscriminately. They are experienced differently, though, depending on one’s socioeconomic status. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, politicians and mainstream media visualized the displaced as not fully American, their victimhood somehow their own making. Graffiti, in turn, reframes these experiences, allowing poor and working-­class men and women to exert their own voices. In one of the few articles that theoretically investigates hurricane graffiti, Derek Alderman and Heather Ward argue that “the social value of reading graffiti requires recognizing that communities—rather than being single monolithic entities—are composed of multiple interests and identities.”18 When examining the vast waves of New Orleans graffiti before and immediately after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, the sheer quantity of graffiti on rooftops, cars, homes, businesses, streets, trees, and debris reveal these varied interests and identities. This chapter, therefore, frames graffiti and bodies. To begin, I explore how the disaster was conceptually framed as a “war zone.” New Orleans was described as a “foreign land,” and media portrayed poor Black people as either rampaging enemy combatants or refugees without rights. Graffiti, however, voiced opposition to this generic narrative, continually visualizing the presence of the dispossessed within the city. First responders, storm victims, and the New Orleans graffiti subculture all used spray paint to counter Katrina’s effects, each representing a different community with varied interests and desires. In totality, though, this graffiti denoted the voices of the marginalized. To demonstrate, I contrast two Katrina photography books—one having very little graffiti and one

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having a substantial amount—to illustrate how graffiti actively frames these responses from below; I also specifically match the graffiti’s vulgarity to the political improprieties that abandoned whole communities. In the second part of this chapter, I discuss a clear shift in how graffiti has been framed in New Orleans after an initial “recovery.” Post-­Katrina, a new graffiti wave has been used to “art wash” away poor minority communities, prepping them for gentrification as the “war zone” turns into a “boutique city.”19 Focusing on the uneasy connection between graffiti and real estate, and concentrating on the relationship between an African American graffiti artist and a white real estate developer, I examine how conflict graffiti transforms into profitable street art.

katrina and the racialized framing of new orleans At 6:30 a.m. on August 29, 2005, flood waters breached the Industrial Canal, which bisects the Upper Ninth Ward, Bywater, and Tremé neighborhoods.20 It was just the beginning. Approximately 8 percent of the surface of New Orleans flooded, and although most people with access to transportation had already left, more than sixty thousand people were stranded, with few options to escape.21 Katrina’s waters breached the levees in places where more than two-­thirds of New Orleans’s Black citizens were living in areas susceptible to flooding.22 The Lower Ninth Ward was particularly devastated because of, as Lynnell Thomas explains, “the long history of local and federal policies that had isolated the neighborhood and facilitated its environmental degradation.”23 Thomas describes New Orleans’ geography as a “white teapot,” as this is the shape appearing on maps with white people concentrated on the highest elevations and Black people living in the low-­lying regions.24 No accurate numbers of Katrina’s death toll takes into account the debilitating sicknesses, suicides, and other injuries tied to the event, but over 1,700 lives were lost, along with $22 billion of insured and uninsured property losses.25 Hurricane Katrina may have been an extraordinary storm, but the extensive damage resulted from neoliberal policies that decimated the city’s infrastructure, creating an environment ripe for catastrophe. Jason Hackworth describes neoliberalism as “the removal of Keynesian artifacts (public housing, public space) policies (redistributive welfare, food stamps) institutions (labor unions, federal government redistribution to states and cities) while neoliberal creation consists of the establishment of new, or cooption of existent institutions and practices to reproduce neoliberalism in the future (government business consortia, workfare

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policies).” All these phenomena are present in pre-­Katrina New Orleans.26 When combined they create the environment for a slow violence Nixon describes as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”27 One example of this slow violence is the erosion of the natural barriers on the New Orleans coast for private excavation, allowing the storm to have an uninterrupted pathway to the city. Another example is the levees themselves, which, under purview of the Army Corps of Engineers, were there to protect the city from flooding, a federal mandated responsibility President Roosevelt signed into law with the 1936 Flood Control Act.28 But although local and federal officials knew the levees’ systems to be unable to survive a Category 3 storm and were badly in need of replacing, the United States Congress drastically cut funding for levee repair right before the hurricane season of 2005.29 For Cedric Johnson, author of The Neoliberal Deluge, “The integrity of the city’s flood protection system has tracked the same arc as its falling economic prosperity during the forty-­ year period between Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 address in the wake of Hurricane Betsy when he pledged to rebuild a first class levee system to George W. Bush’s post-­Katrina speech in Jackson Square.”30 Many conservative commentators, however, saw the government’s ineffectual responses as a result of too much government oversight and subsidies, not a lack of it, framing victims as inept failures. David Boaz of the Cato Institute blamed hurricane victims: “The welfare state has taught generations of poor people to look to government for everything— housing, food, money. Their sense of responsibility and self-­reliance has atrophied.” Thus, the “government so destroyed wealth and self-­reliance in the people of New Orleans that they were unable to fend for themselves in a crisis.”31 While Boaz does not directly mention race in his rant, it is clearly a centerpiece to his argument. Other commentators were more explicit. John McWhorter of the National Review stated, “What Katrina revealed was the result of one especially unsuccessful attempt to address Black poverty: 30 years of teaching poor Black people not to work for a living.”32 Rush Limbaugh, who received the Medal of Honor in 2020 from President Trump, offered these racist comments with full-­throated abandon when he compared Hurricane Katrina to the 2008 Midwest floods:33 I see devastation in Iowa and Illinois that dwarfs what happened in New Orleans. I see people working together. I see people trying to save their property. . . . I don’t see a bunch of people running around waving guns at helicopters. I don’t see a bunch of people running shooting cops. I don’t

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see a bunch of people raping people on the street. I don’t see a bunch of people . . . whining and moaning, “Where’s FEMA, where’s Bush?” I see the heartland of America. When I look at Iowa and when I look at Illinois, I see the backbone of America.34

Limbaugh’s harangue is one principally of framing: white Americans are independent individuals who work together in times of crisis, whereas Black Americans are state-­dependent thugs who individually profit from the devastation. For conservative commentators gripping tight to neoliberal policies, the welfare system’s “culture of dependency” created in New Orleans a class of nonresilient poor Blacks who either “whined and moaned” or were rapists and murderers. Individual responsibility, not decades of public policy that allowed the levees to falter, was the framing device for racist victim-­blaming of those thousands of poor whom Katrina stranded. Repeatedly, conservative and mainstream media have framed Black victims of New Orleans as not quite fully American citizens. Unlike the “backbone” of the United States needed for the national body to properly function, these people were disposable appendages. The media often referred to New Orleanians with no homes to return to as “refugees.” Numerous interviewees in Spike Lee’s 2006 documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, argued that the term refugee was inaccurate and hurtful. Caroline Reeves, a displaced woman forcefully made this point when she sat before the US Senate: “We are Americans. We are homeowners and we pay taxes and we are citizens. My question to you is: when can we rejoin the country?”35 Just as Puerto Rican victims of Hurricane Maria in 2017 were described as “foreign” refugees instead of US citizens, many displaced poor and Black New Orleanians feel the post-­Katrina city remains within, as Sharon Monteith states, “the nation’s postcolonial shadow.”36 Besides a painful commentary of loss that many victims experience when forced to leave the city of their birth, Reeves’s question is, like both Rush Limbaugh’s diatribe and Governor Blanco’s shoot-­to-­kill statement, one of framing. In the days after the hurricane, news reports of looting and violence created an image of a racialized lawless criminal. New Orleans was reduced to a war zone with an infamous CNN lead into its newscast being typical of the rhetoric: “On the dark streets, rampaging gangs take full advantage of the unguarded city. Anyone venturing outside is in danger of being robbed or even shot. It is a state of siege.”37 Fantasies of rapists and murderers running around the streets of New Orleans with full abandon (often retracted in the days afterward) were framed as Black citizens’ response to being without government welfare.

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As Anna Hartnell states of this irresponsible journalism on both rightand left-­leaning news shows, this coverage “criminalized the plight of those left to fend for themselves in a drowning city.”38 This racialized framing that Matthew Power succinctly describes as “shades of racial hysteria” became more pronounced in the national media after Katrina made landfall.39 Stereotypes of heroes and villains, victims and thugs began to narratively emerge with race used to primarily categorize individuals into these stock characters.40 In the first days after the storm, images of victims waving white flags on chopped-­through roofs often were framed empathetically, hinting that the devastation was a socially constructed disaster in which race and poverty were key components. But as the days passed, there was a shift in the narrative to stories of civil unrest and urban insurgency, which were organized in terms of a “war zone” metaphor. The narrative began with the media focus on the supposed dominance of armed gangs wandering the city, but culminated in the celebrations of General Russel Honoré, the “Category 5 General.”41 These war references continued to place Black Americans and New Orleans as somehow outside of the United States. Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi stated that New Orleans looked “like Hiroshima,” and the late Georgia congressman John Lewis stated that it reminded him of Somalia: “I saw little babies dying before my eyes.” Ron Eyerman on the coverage said: “The dominant image was still that of a war zone, a lone helicopter hovering close to the ground in an atmosphere of smoke and devastation, with lines of tired and distressed individuals waiting evacuation.” By framing the recovery as a military intervention, with “good guys” like General Honoré commandeering the streets of New Orleans, the governmental response was framed as one of military conflict management. The aftermath of the hurricane, then, was not a humanitarian crisis but an armed conflict.42 The specter of the term exceptional has lingered over New Orleans from its inception. The city was a leading North American slave-­trading market, and this history weighs heavily in its present. The celebrating of white exceptionalism within a Black space, according to Thomas, is one reason New Orleans is a major tourist destination. The racist history informs the city as a destination, making it both a real place and a concept, where “for many whites this idea of New Orleans provides a safe, sanctioned space to indulge in Black culture and unite with Black bodies, if only vicariously.”43 Thomas notes that pre-­Katrina, the relationship of the city to its Black inhabitants has been one of desire and disaster, as “the city’s promotion of Black cultural consumption produced a ‘desire’ for ‘Blackness’ at the same time this ‘Blackness’ was used to signify the ‘disaster’ of Black

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emancipation and desegregation.” Pre-­Katrina New Orleans tourism was a historically paradoxical construction of Blackness acknowledging and celebrating Black cultural contributions while simultaneously insisting upon Black cultural inferiority, indicting Black Americans for perceived postbellum and post–­civil rights era social ills of poverty, crime, immorality, inadequacy, and political corruption. These competing impulses of desire and disaster facilitated the symbolic continuance of slavery as appropriation of Black labor and denial of Black history and agency.44 Advertising New Orleans as the Big Easy, with its spirit of relaxation, while actively selling stereotypes of Black people singing, dancing, and serving brought tourists into the area within its carnival atmosphere. For Emily Clark, marketing the Crescent City as “foreign” in the national imaginary is calamitous for the city.45 By being framed as always on the outside, the responses to New Orleans—like the responses to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017—have been uneven. After Katrina made landfall, the media framed Black and poor people as “problems” the United States had to deal with. Whether New Orleans had to “live with” this problem was left unanswered. The graffiti waves by various groups illustrate responses to this racial and economic framing. In the storm’s immediate aftermath, rescue work­ ers used spray paint to communicate with one another. Victims, looking for rescue and arguing for justice, responded through graffiti, amplifying a variety of desperate voices. Concurrently, graffiti writers, a subcultural presence before the storm, also took to the empty streets and painted the ruins. How these voices combined (and resisted each other) is the subject of the next section.

katrina graffiti waves: before, during, and after the storm After Katrina tore through New Orleans, state and federal authorities attempted to search all houses and buildings in the city for survivors. Completely overwhelmed, they had neither a centralized database nor wireless technology to inform one another of their discoveries. They relied, therefore, on spray paint. Crews canvassed from neighborhood to neighborhood spray-­painting an X on each home they inspected, writing information in the spaces between the crossing lines of the X to detail what they did or did not find. According to James Johnson, “The date of the visit was noted in the upper quadrant (9–12 for example), the left quadrant recorded the agency (FL-­1 for the first Florida team), the lower left quadrant recorded what was discovered (1 dead in the attic); the right lower quadrant seems to have been used only when the house was not

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entered ‘NE.’ ”46 Adding to these government responses, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and other agencies also spray-­painted homes with notes regarding abandoned animals. In dialogue with these Xs, victims often wrote responses to this graffiti, adding current information on where they were living and contact information. If graffiti can be viewed as tattoos on the body of a house, photos of these homes reveal scars of various colors and handwriting with Xs, boxes, words, and numbers framing a picture of the chaotic days following Katrina’s landfall. The National Guard and victims of the storm were participating in what Joby Bass described as using the landscape itself as a “direct communication device.” As he explains, “With no communication infrastructure in place, the landscape becomes a table upon which we leave messages for others around us.”47 In the post-­Katrina landscape, though, often the table was broken and the messages were of death.48 These marks also reveal powerful rhetoric memorializing the storm victims and the inept government response. Graffiti are often recognized as signs of urban chaos, and, in this case, it was. Needing to save lives, first responders waded into the dirty waters, entering homes to search for Katrina survivors. As they made their marks and filled in the lower quadrant of the X with numbers, they were witnessing for the dead. Men and women bloated from being in the water and in stifling conditions of temperatures nearing a hundred degrees were having their death acknowledged with a memorial tattoo placed upon their own homes. In the Lower Ninth Ward, the community, though extremely poor, had a proportionally higher number of owner-­occupied houses than the city as a whole (59 percent compared to 47 percent in Orleans Parish).49 The Xs signified not only the end of their lives but also a testament to their lives. A tattooed death announcement on their own private homes, a cornerstone of the American dream, the Xs were a dialogue between the occupant (lower quadrant) and agents of federal and state governments (left-­ hand quadrant) who were too late to come to their aid. Placed on homes to alert others of the dead inside, graffiti became markers of the government’s failure. Walking through the neighborhoods of Bywater, Marigny, and the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards more than a decade later, it does not take long to come across these official graffiti-­marked Xs. Some owners who refurbished their homes have kept the marks so that they never forget (similarly there are many Hurricane Katrina tattoos on survivors’ bodies).50 Other abandoned homes still have marks on their decaying exterior. The graffiti shows the interminable spirit of the people of New Orleans; it is also a reminder that the city has not recovered fully from the storm.

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Abandoned house with Katrina markings, New Orleans. Photo by John Lennon.

Depending on when the graffiti was written—before, during, or after the storm—the various graffiti waves reflected the desires and fears of those in Katrina’s path. For example, before Katrina made landfall, residents placed plywood on doors and windows, writing messages to the oncoming storm, often begging “her” to stay away.51 Some had witty messages (and often sexist ones given the gendered name of the storm), others were religious in sentiment. As is also common in hurricane graffiti, individuals directed threats at real and imagined looters on homes and businesses. “Looters will be shot” was a common spray-­painted statement of intent. Some messages, though, were more expansive. One resident wrote, “Don’t Try. I am sleeping inside with a big dog and ugly woman, two shotguns and a claw hammer.”52 While this particular graffiti was somewhat unique in its attempt at humor to warn off looters, fears against imagined hordes of would-­be looters often have a racial tinge to them. In When the Levees Broke, when a white man excitedly describes his large arsenal to “protect his property,” Spike Lee only somewhat jokingly asks, “Who are you afraid of, Bin Laden?”53 The graffiti became more desperate once the impact of the storm was realized. Various written pleas of “Help!” were ubiquitous. In a typical situation, as news cameras filmed men and women on their roofs waving American flags, the camera focused on the graffiti by the victims’ feet: “The Water is Rising, please help.”

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Residents wait to be rescued, “Water is rising” graffiti, New Orleans. Photo by David J. Phillips/Reuters.

Help, though, did not always arrive. In one photo of a house devastated by Katrina, under a broken window there is a shakily sprayed word, “Help.” A few feet from the window, in a different color of spray paint, “Dead Body Inside” appears above the door. Katrina graffiti by victims took on many roles—some were informational, others accusatory; some were dialogues with neighbors, and others pleas for survival. These were not polite discussions. To read this graffiti is to experience a conversation that became a cacophony of voices expressing anger, fear, humor, love, and despair. For example, two agencies checked a house for humans and animals, placing their Xs on the exterior. “We R okay” is the seeming response, along with a telephone number and the name “Johnnie” sprayed across the front of the house. But as time passed after the storm, the victims’ responses became more

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angry; graffiti on a wall next to what appears to be a covered dead body reads “R.I.P. Fuck You Whore Katrina,” while other graffiti called out specifically FEMA (“fix everything my ass / Someone is getting rich”), and still others made simple declarative sentences about the president, such as “Bush sucks.” Examining graffiti waves pre- and post-­storm, Alderman and Ward create eight categories of hurricane graffiti. While these groupings are too rigid and hurricane graffiti contain numerous desires within individual statements, the range of messages certainly speaks to the various ways community members experience a storm.54 Even with their large system categorizing hurricane graffiti, Alderman and Ward, however, do not discuss self-­described graffiti writers as storm victims, nor do they analyze how the graffiti writers reacted to the devastation upon their lives. In most analyses of New Orleans post-­Katrina graffiti, there is little acknowledgment of the vibrant graffiti scene that was present before, during, and after the storm, leaving out a significant portion of who was still writing graffiti post-­Katrina.55 In New Orleans, a small but dedicated group of graffiti writers active in the graffiti scene before Katrina saw the devastated city’s walls as a new opportunity to paint. Numerous graffiti writers in New Orleans whom I interviewed used the phrase “wide open” to describe their city in the weeks and months after Katrina made landfall. Before the storm, New Orleans had a significant graffiti subculture. There was no graffiti vandal squad in the city, and if writers stayed away from the tourist spots (specifically the French Quarter), they wouldn’t be hassled much by the police. After the storm, though, things opened up exponentially. Billy, a white thirty-­something graffiti writer, born and raised in New Orleans, returned to the city two months after Katrina hit when the first tattoo shop opened and he could return to work. He explained: “Going out it just became a thing. Like go out, get a drink, have a bag of beer in one hand and bag of paint in the other, and just walking down the street with your friends. Anywhere and everywhere.”56 The police were nonexistent, and while he felt the National Guard had a “shoot first” mentality (the National Guard chased Billy a few times), he was mostly able to avoid them because their jeeps had large spotlights. Since the city was in darkness, “you could see them a mile away.” The result was that often he felt a sense of “vertigo” because “of the vast openness and the lack of humanity” in his city.57 Billy began noticing graffiti during the 1984 World’s Fair in the city. The graffiti scene wasn’t big, but reading the tags back then, he noticed a few dedicated people getting their name up. Two years later, he was doing so as well. As a white kid growing up as part of the majority-­minority com-

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munity, he became friends with graffiti writers of different races and was known within the graffiti subculture, traveling freely throughout the city, crossing invisible but regulated racial boundaries. Tagging was the biggest part of the graffiti scene before Katrina, with the crew Top Mob being the most prolific. The crew formed when friends Bugs One, SGP, and Dusky joined together to blanket the city with their names. The group expanded to include the writers DJ Real, Baser, Risk, Elle One, Rock, Kane, Axe, Kash, Harsh, and a few others. Some had lived in New Orleans all their lives, but others were transplants. Although certainly not as expansive as the scenes in London, New York, or Buenos Aires, New Orleans graffiti writers were active and known outside the region. Skylar Fein, a New Orleans–­based artist, remembers those early days after Katrina and seeing the Harsh tag, “broadcasting out over the spectacular destruction.”58 A member of Top Mob with a large presence before and after the storm, Harsh is a bomber, hitting all parts of the city with his well-­recognized tag, including on a billboard outside the iconic Circle Food store right off North Claiborne Avenue, which was severely underwater after Katrina.59 Looking out at the tag near Circle Food, Fein states: “There it is, there it is. Just the overt content of it was so perfect. It’s harsh, man, it’s harsh, I just can’t get enough of this. And that’s not necessarily why he was putting it up there, but that’s what I was getting out of it.”60 Reading the simple tag in the midst of a devastated city had an impact on Fein and reporters such as Doug MacCash, the Times-­Picayune reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his post-­Katrina reporting. Harsh added a descriptive caption to the landscape that spoke a desperate truth as national media created racist narratives of lawless thugs and politicians consistently deflected blame. As Fein states: “I thought, ‘Yes, that’s it. He speaks for me. He speaks for everyone I know.’”61 Harsh is one of the original graffiti writers of New Orleans, and he is part of the first wave of graffiti that mixed with the second wave of conflict graffiti as it crashed in the midst of the disaster. He captured the overall city’s zeitgeist. The sprayed messages from first responders, survivors, and graffiti writers allowed those in New Orleans to reground themselves, reestablishing a place where homes had literally been picked up from their foundations and swept down the street. Some of the responses were practical—placing telephone numbers on homes reestablished connections between family and friends who had been dispersed by the storm. On others, graffiti acted as call-­and-­response, as people “talked back” to each other. As graffiti filled the city’s spaces, it also interacted with those graffiti writers whose tags conversed with all the other writing. Graffiti showed a city alive, though badly damaged, looking for help. The chaos in

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the aftermath of a devastating hurricane is extraordinary, and the graffiti reflects the ways people cope and communicate in a constantly changing situation. Graffiti offers an essential voice of the dispossessed, offering a counterpoint to the framing narratives emerging after the storm. When this voice is missing, the absence has an impact on how we understand post-­Katrina New Orleans. This point becomes clear when examining two coffee-­table books that collected unpeopled images of the city in the days and weeks after August 29, 2005. A city framed without graffiti is a dead city. A city framed with graffiti is one (angrily) alive.

katrina as coffee-­t able book Googling “Katrina graffiti” reveals thousands of pages of clickable graffiti-­covered walls. As mentioned earlier, the graffiti encompasses a wide range of emotional responses from a variety of victims. There were two books, though, that curated some of the destruction found in the city and were sold as coffee-­table books: Robert Polidori’s After the Flood and Richard Misrach’s Destroy This Memory. Both look at a devastated city in very different ways, with graffiti (or the lack of it) being a significant difference between the two. Polidori returned to New Orleans on assignment for the New Yorker immediately after Katrina hit the city in which he once lived. The unpeopled photos of After the Flood offer an unflinching look at the abandoned structures, the waterlogged interiors, the discarded cars, and moldy appliances left in the sweltering heat. It is a city captured in its post-­Katrina state, a city, as Polidori states, “that care forgot.” A documentary photographer who previously photographed the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, his photos display an understated beauty; the colors are often arrestingly vibrant, even when showing the horrifying blackish-­ brown marks of the high waterline in a kitchen’s interior. There is little to no authorial commentary on the photos themselves. Polidori state’s the book is “no attempt to excavate what went wrong in New Orleans or why the state and federal response remains even today predisposed to cronyism, gross fraud and corruption.”62 Instead, as the biblical name implies, the book frames the debris as resulting from a destructive event that left many dead. In a review of the book, the New York Times describes in stark terms the post-­Katrina city through Polidori’s lens: “New Orleans as our modern Pompeii.”63 Like that city destroyed in AD 79, what remains are only artifacts. A massive 333-­page coffee-­table book, After the Flood features hardly any graffiti.64 Mostly, the photos capture the inside or outside of devas-

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tated homes. Devoid of the living, the book easily sinks into what has been categorized as “ruin porn.” Flipping through the pages, there is a distinct feeling of an ending throughout the book—and because there is little evidence of people in New Orleans, including no shots of responses to the storm through post-­Katrina graffiti—there does not seem to be anyone present to rebuild. After the Flood certainly has religious overtones, but it points to an absence; neither savior nor saved are anywhere in the photographs.65 Polidori claims in his introduction that, as a photographer, he acts as a “witness.” Michael Levine, in his review of After the Flood, however, disagrees: “But given the content of his photographs—decontextualized beautiful ruins devoid of people, the question is what he was claiming to bear witness to?” As Levine argues, to witness is to hold someone or something accountable for the devastation; by presenting the beauty of the destruction, Levine claims the book is pornographic, fetishizing ruins for the viewer’s pleasure. Levine argues that Polidori’s photos are not even empathetic but rather “cater to the spectator’s desires not to be disturbed; to their voyeurism . . . to other desires and wishes (sadistic, masochistic, narcissistic, fetishist, etc.) relating to our orectic nature.”66 For Levine, After the Flood amounts to no more than an opportunity for selfish “rubbernecking,” with the viewer comfortably safe from the horrific ruins. Richard Misrach’s Destroy This Memory, in contrast, has an active aesthetic presence. While both books are devoid of people, Misrach’s photos still capture a population alive and furiously responding. Misrach’s New Orleans is not a Pompeii-­like city where time stands still; rather, it is a broken city discovering its vulgar and accusatory voice. Graffiti allows this voice to be heard. While capturing the official marking of Xs on homes, the photographer documents a parallel narrative of spray-­painted responses to the destruction. Some were warnings, others prayers. Some thoughts were open ended, others policy solutions. Contrary to the plea in the title, the victims are not memorialized but, through graffiti, are revealed to be present among the spectacular destruction. This absent-­yet-­present aura appears in the book’s opening images. The first page shows the word help in white paint across a sunken roof. The second page consists of an image of the house with all the shingles torn off and a familiar yellow X on its side. In red, right above the house address is the spray-­painted word fuck. The interplay between the first image (“Help”) and the second image (“Fuck”) displays the despair of a nonpresent individual on the wall. This home housed someone who needed help and, in turn, has been fucked. Like “Harsh” sprayed on a wall in a drowned city, this graffiti displays an uncomfortable truth.

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Victims’ vulgar responses frame the collection of photos. For example, in three sequential pages, the viewer sees a series of three photographs of a large shipping container displaced in the middle of someone’s backyard. At the center of the container is the simple declaration “Fuck You.” The first of the three images is a tight frame of the container, so it is impossible to discern the object where the words are written. The second photograph is shot from farther away, displaying the container on its side in what is now evident as a backyard. The third image, taken a bit farther out, shows not only the backyard but also debris from the surrounding houses, including two wooden cribs. Neither the cribs nor the container belong there—and the vulgarity of the situation interrelates with the words on the shipping container. The words accost the viewer who, through the sequence of these three photographs, is slowly understanding what she sees. Unlike in Polidori’s book where there is a safe distance between viewer and city-­as-­artifact, in these series of photographs, the city is alive, with the graffiti angrily cursing the reader’s passivity. The photos in Destroy This Memory are mostly full-­page close-­ups; there is no space to distance oneself from the images. While unpeopled, the graffiti illustrates that victims have been present before and after the storm. There are numerous images of graffitied angry remarks toward the government and to insurance agencies, naming individuals and corporations whom victims feel have abandoned them, such as “I got fucked by All State.” As one image on a home’s brick wall states in white spray paint, “I died here waiting for an ajuster [sic],” with arrows pointing to an open window. The victims’ presence—alive and dead—abound throughout the collection.67 Returning to Levine’s comments that unpeopled photos of post-­Katrina are simply ruin porn, the graffiti in Misrach’s book offer a counterpoint. Spray-­painted words and images by people suffering are poignantly direct, underscoring the victims’ humanity. Through their vulgarity, the graffiti on houses, roofs, and walls of New Orleans are collectively arguing against racist policies and the incompetence and systematic failures of the local, state, and federal government. These photographs featuring graffiti contradict Bush’s statement in the days after Katrina’s landfall that “the storm didn’t discriminate and neither will the recovery effort” and rebut the pacifying lies of government politicians who claim leaders are doing a “heck of a job.”68 In examining traumatic photos of war victims, Susie Linfield writes that “what photographers can do, and do particularly well, is to show how those without such rights look, and what the absence of such rights does to a person. . . . And they can, and have, shown us what people struggling for rights look like, in victory and defeat.”69 The graffiti of Misrach’s photographs offer a counternarrative

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to the framing devices of the media that (inaccurately) proclaimed New Orleans as a place of anarchic gangs roaming the streets. The photos also offer a counterargument to the photographs found in books like After the Flood that show a city as a tomb. How this graffiti is interpreted is a question of media, modes of production, and audience. With the national media breathlessly (and erroneously) reporting on “looting,” inaccurately depicting actions of survival in racial stereotypes, these pleas and angry diatribes appearing on homes, walls, and roofs were the immediate localized voices of victims carrying on conversations overheard by the larger nation. In 2005, the New York Times published a story on post-­Katrina New Orleans with the headline “From the Margins of Society to the Center of Tragedy.” The headline is only partially accurate: victims of Katrina certainly became the site of tragedy, but they never lost their marginality. Survivors’ graffiti written after the storm forcibly opened an avenue for these marginalized voices, often contrary to the national narrative. Without this graffiti, the local responses would have been more muted. Alderman and Ward argue that people write hurricane graffiti “to avoid being written off,” and doing so reflects “the degree to which people are willing to express their vulnerability in a frank and public fashion.”70 Many lost their homes, jobs, family, and neighbor support systems on the morning of August 29, 2005. Graffiti exposes their vulnerabilities while allowing them to process these losses. For example, the short film Cleveland Street, a collaboration between the artists Helen Hill and Courtney Egan that sutures Hill’s pre-­Katrina home movies with Egan’s post-­ Katrina video showing the same locations, displays the victims’ ability to tell their own stories through graffiti. Dan Streible analyzes this film, focusing on the graffiti Hill wrote on her house: “We are all okay, cats, baby, Pop, even Rosie the Pig!!! We miss y’all [heart shape].” In the film, the graffiti acts as an anchor, tying together shots of Hill in South Carolina anxiously cobbling together her family’s life after the hurricane with video of the house and the neighborhood before the storm. The graffiti is a message of hope and love, contextualizing the larger story of Katrina.71 For Klingman and colleagues, hurricane graffiti is part of an “expressive ritual of fellowship, affirming the fact that one is not alone in their feelings of grief or anger, shame or vulnerability.”72 This graffiti fellowship emerges in people’s participation in the written call-­and-­response on houses. These localized rejoinders reframe the narrative of marginality forced on victims by the national media. As marginalized individuals attempted to process their losses, officials were making declarative statements to the media that the city would rebuild and come back stronger, even before the true extent of the dam-

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age was apparent. How, though, does a city recover from a storm that revealed the violent racial and economic wounds left untreated for so long? In the immediate aftermath of the storm, graffiti was one medium expressing victims’ anger and desires in a destroyed city. In the next section, I address how a new graffiti wave has been a catalyst for developers to rebrand the city, focusing on the relationship between Brandan Odums, an African American artist, and Sean Cummings, a white New Orleanian developer. As the city lurches toward a postconflict city, people and communities are being erased under globs of spray paint.

the “ artification ” of new orleans Norman Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With depicts partially erased graffiti that was both a racist categorization and a threat to Ruby Bridges, the little girl walking with the protection of US Marshals to her classroom at William Frantz Elementary School in the Upper Ninth Ward. The “problem” Ruby lived with, of course, was not only segregated schools. Racist screeds against little girls do not end at school entrances; systemic racism is part and parcel of daily life. To get to her classroom that day, Ruby had to leave her home in the Florida Projects, a housing development a few blocks from the school. More than fifty years after that fateful school morning, flooding from Hurricane Katrina destroyed the Florida Projects. These projects became unlivable, the residents displaced. Graffiti writers used these decrepit abandoned buildings to tag, write messages, and draw images. One of those writers was Brandan “Bmike” Odums, an African American artist and educator who filled wall after wall and room after room with words and images, a private homage to his civil rights heroes. It was only the beginning. This graffiti story begins with an activist celebrating Black history in the very place where lived a young girl who put herself in danger to desegregate the New Orleans school system. The story evolves, though, as a white millionaire developer uses the graffiti to rebrand the formerly multiethnic working-­class neighborhood as a “revitalized” section of the “new” New Orleans. Examining this relationship allows us to see how graffiti, a voice of the marginalized, can function as a tool to remarginalize the same people as the city rebuilds. Odums was born in Oceanside, California, but he moved around for his father’s Marine Corps service, landing in New Orleans when he was eight years old.73 He attended Edna Karr High School in Algiers before enrolling in the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts in the working-­ class, racially mixed Bywater neighborhood. Always interested in video

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and hip-­hop, Odums studied film at the University of New Orleans. To pay bills, he started working for a local public-­access television station, where he listened to his “elders” talking about important, local issues— topics he would have missed had he not been required to listen to them for his job. He realized the value in community-­led education and wanted a career that would touch on the important concerns he was listening to (and experiencing as a young Black man in New Orleans). Most important, though, he wanted to work with youth. Odums’s activist focus has always been intergenerational; one of the T-­shirts he designed, for example, has the line “i am my ancestors’ wildest dreams” printed across the front.74 This desire to bridge generations is evident in a number of his projects. As a first-­year university student, he worked with friends on video projects that ballooned into 2-­Cent Entertainment, a company producing videos for a popular edutainment YouTube channel. The goal of 2-­Cent Entertainment was to use a BET-­style format to create content that connected youth with issues such as the failing educational system in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.75 Odums, an artist-­entrepreneur, weds his activist art with mainstream platforms. As he says in his TED talk, he wanted to use hip-­hop culture, including graffiti, to create a positive impact in society. He did not know, though, much about graffiti culture, becoming interested only when given an opportunity to teach a course on hip-­hop at Xavier University: “Before that, I was sort of ignorant of it. I was still concerned with trying to study the ‘great artists.’”76 Teaching graffiti to his students opened his eyes; unlike the paintings he examined in museums, graffiti and hip-­hop reflected his and his friends’ lives. Odums began directing music videos, working with people like Kendrick Lamar, Spike Lee, Mannie Fresh, Mos Def, Juvenile, Mystikal, Trombone Shorty, and Dee-­1.77 This interest in media, graffiti, and activism all coalesced in the graffiti he produced in the Florida Projects. In 2010, he taught Native American children on the San Carlos Apache reservation in Arizona to use cameras to tell their own stories. While admiring a café’s mural, he befriended the artist Douglas Miles. A short time later, organizers of the 2013 New Orleans Jazz Fest flew Miles out to create an Apache-­themed mural on the fairgrounds. Unfortunately, because of heavy rains, Miles needed an indoor spot to paint.78 Meeting up with Miles, Odums brought him to the Florida Projects. Odums discovered the projects because, as he stated in an interview: “I got hit with the bug to explore these places. Me and a bunch of friends, we would go urban exploring, to all these places that were forgotten or destroyed, and take photos. And I would see a lot of graffiti. It became a

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habit to bring spray paint with us, and leave a tag that let people know that we were there.”79 Odums tag at the time was a wildstyle “Free,” often accompanied by a positive message—for example, in the abandoned George Washington Carver High School, he wrote, “More than 1,000,000 students drop out every year. Don’t be one.”80 Obviously, Odums was not a traditional graffiti tagger; he was more interested in message than form. Because he felt he could never get the wildstyle lettering right, he says, “Eventually, I just said, ‘I’m not good at lettering. But I can draw. I can paint.’”81 Using leftover spray cans from Miles, Bmike began using the Florida Projects as his “own personal journal,” spray-­painting images of James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Jean-­Michel Basquiat, Fred Hampton, Muhammad Ali, and Bob Marley, among other Black leaders. As Odums continued to paint, friends would stop by to see what he was doing. Word quickly spread. It is not lost on Odums that Fred Hampton, the deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party, made fair housing a fundamental part of the Black Panther platform. The fourth point in the Black Panthers’ Ten-­Point Program explicitly argues for fair housing, demanding the reallocation of private property into government collective housing: “we want decent housing, fit for the shelter of human beings. We believe that if the landlords will not give decent housing to our black and oppressed communities, then housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that the people in our communities, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for the people.”82 The Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed discrimination by landlords on the basis of race, gender, class, or sex. The Black Panther Party, however, was arguing for a more robust, communal, anticapitalist reform. By drawing the slain civil rights leader inside a housing project abandoned due to systematic racist practices, Odums was explicitly connecting the Black Panthers’ declaration of housing rights with what Black New Orleanians needed post-­ Katrina. As he explained to me: Like it’s painted on an abandoned housing projects that was abandoned for political reasons—because of the banks, because of the storm, because of the disaster. It’s not occupied because of neglect. And here it is we’re painting pictures of the Black Panther Party saying we want fair housing. Then all of a sudden there’s other people saying there’s some statements being made, and I think that sort of attracted other artists to come in and explore the space in the same way. So that’s how that project began to grow legs in a way that other artists came in . . . So yeah, it was like a Bat Signal.83

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When Odums painted in the Florida Projects, there could be up to twenty people either with spray paint in their hands or taking pictures of the walls. A local school principal brought her teachers to see the political art; eventually a school bus filled with children turned up to walk around the abandoned projects. Building on the attention, Odums named the space Project Be. It did not take long for the media to discover it; Skylar Fein of the Nola Defender published an interview with Odums.84 Soon after, Doug MacCash wrote a Times-­Picayune article about Odums’s graffiti, beginning with the tantalizing line, “‘Project Be’ is a public art masterpiece that I can’t invite you to see.”85 A Bat signal, indeed. Soon people of various races, ages, and classes were making their way up the stairs of the Florida Projects, including an interviewer from the New Orleans–­based television station, WGNO. Despite earning praise in newspapers and local broadcasts, the graffiti project was, in fact, illegal. The Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) owned the housing projects, and armed officers patrolled the area (Odums had a gun drawn on him when hiding from authorities in a third floor closet). As cars double-­parked in front of “No Trespassing” signs, and people strolled around with cameras around their necks, it was not long before HANO secured the area with more officers. Always the entrepreneur, Odums met with HANO representatives and attempted to have them underwrite curating the building to combat the negative press HANO received from the affordable housing crisis in New Orleans as rents skyrocketed post-­Katrina. Instead of working with him, HANO insisted that Odums offer a written apology for trespassing. Odums’s pitch to HANO was partly based on his admiration of Banksy: “I had just seen Exit through the Gift Shop and I was watching things that were happening in other cities. I was like, we could do a public event here that could bring people together with this art, teach them about what’s possible within these spaces. They just weren’t seeing it.”86 There is, of course, a difference between Banksy and Odums. Banksy’s mode of operation is creating large shows while staying anonymous. Odums was trying to convince HANO to allow people to walk around an abandoned housing project whose art highlights the Black Panthers’ fair housing mantra. A legal and political nightmare, HANO brought in more security to police the grounds, placing metal barriers on the windows, but it never painted over the graffiti. Instead, HANO preserved it like a museum that no one could enter. Odums, though, was just getting started. Project Be was officially closed, but he found another, much larger abandoned apartment complex—360 units—on the city’s west bank (plate 12). This time he documented his painting on social media. One day while he was painting, the owner of

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the property saw him—unlike the Florida Projects, it was private property—and he was excited to see the murals. Odums pitched him an idea of a show highlighting the murals (and property). The owner gave him a key to the front gate. Odums envisioned a show titled Exhibit Be and began researching the history of the building, discovering that the property was abandoned not because of Katrina but “due to some slum lords, because of ‘disaster capitalism,’ as some would call it. People were evicted during one of the biggest housing crises of the city, and they were forcefully evicted so that insurance money could be gotten for the owners.”87 With this in mind, he brought in graffiti writers—according to Odums, about 70 percent were local writers—and instructed them on the housing project’s history: “So here we are in the midst of this very political site, and so my goal was, I gave all these artists all of this information—I gave them information about what happened, and a lot of them dropped out as a result, but I was like, this has to inform what we do. We can’t treat this like a blank space. We have to understand that this is a canvas that’s already filled; we have to figure out how to collaborate with this information.”88 For Odums, this painful city history should inform the artists’ work, and the graffiti needed to reflect the pain disenfranchisement had caused the evicted men, women, and children. That the owner of the building who allowed Odums to paint his building is a beneficiary of disaster capitalism was not commented on. Odums is walking a very fine line here. In our interview, he (gently) criticized graffiti writers and street artists who believe that “the wall is just a byproduct of whatever my statement is.” Instead, he said: “We have to speak for these spaces. We have to understand who sees the work. My goal was to be as confrontational as possible with the work . . . to remind people that these spaces are empty, not for our enjoyment. They’re empty because of some very bad reasons, and we need to be confrontational and direct about that.”89 To highlight these racist and classist practices, he felt that it was necessary to work with a man making money from disaster capitalism. Like many activist artists, Odums was in a precarious position, trying to steady his footing in sandy conditions. Odums was moving into a second phase of his three-­phase plan: while Project Be was organic and personal, Exhibit Be was cause-­driven: “My attraction to graf[fiti] was the rebellious revolutionary nature. I was like, this is a revolutionary idea: writing on all these spaces without permission. I felt that alone was political; that alone has the potential to be powerful. I felt like the only thing I was missing was the cause. They were rebels without a cause, and I thought that this site could help me give these writers a cause.”90 Odums felt he needed to organize them

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under a “cause” even though the local writers were living through post-­ Katrina tribulations in all aspects of their daily lives. Some writers who had been in New Orleans for years objected to the parameters he set. Odums, though, is an energetic and skilled organizer. The building’s owner agreed to a small exhibit if Odums could get insurance; he was able to secure it and found himself with fifteen days to get his exhibit ready. But Odums revealed, “I don’t think [the owner] had the vision to know what was happening.”91 Odums, however, had the vision—he just needed the financing. He found it with the developer Sean Cummings who, among other things, offered to help finance Exhibit Be, including by buying thousands of cans of spray paint. On the first day Exhibit Be opened, 2,500 people showed up. Odums and Cummings decided to keep the exhibit open. Laudatory coverage and a certain cultural cachet that embraced urban exploration and the hint of illegality helped the exhibit’s success. Odums reupped on the insurance, and the project stayed open every Saturday for three months. News of Exhibit Be was spread by local newscasts, newspapers, and, like many things in New Orleans, word of mouth. The Nola Defender glowingly described the exhibit: “Part social experiment of the dueling nature of graffiti as art verses vandalism, part healing memorial to the tenants evicted from the complex in 2006 following Katrina, the massive project expressed the potential for abandoned spaces to become places for positive communal growth rather than virtual human neglect.”92 At the end of the three months, Cummings called Odums: “You got to hit big. What do you plan on doing?” The entrepreneurial-­minded Odums had a plan. He had just watched the comedian Dave Chappelle’s Block Party and wanted to do something similar. Cummings was willing to finance, and Odums “immediately called in Erykah Badu, David Banner, Dead Prez, Dee-­1, Trombone Shorty.”93 Cummings had told Odums to “aim high,” and he certainly did; more than ten thousand people came to the party. The police attempted to close the space down when the crowd became too large, but people continued to hop fences. Although one of the city’s most successful developers financed the event, as people stepped on broken glass and walked through crumbling rooms, the whole event had an air of illegality attached to it. When the mayor speaks at your event, though, how “illegal” is it? While Exhibit Be had its origins in a man painting alone in an abandoned project, it quickly turned into an event financed by one of the city’s richest developers responsible for buildings in New Orleans that cater to the well-­ heeled (and predominately white). After the event, Cummings offered a large, empty warehouse in Bywater to Odums, who has a month-­to-­month

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lease with an informal agreement that when Cummings refurbishes the building, Odums will have a (smaller) space to show and pre­sent his art. Odums has categorized this warehouse as Studio Be, the third part of the development arc evolving over the past few years. Odums developed the warehouse into his own gallery, and there, like Banksy, viewers exit through a gift shop. His paintings are often large and depict civil rights issues. As he stated: “Dr. Cornel West said that a condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. So I feel like in a way, a lot of my artwork is about a certain narrative of suffering, because that in lies a certain level of truth that I’m trying to represent. So most of the narratives that I paint is this conversation of struggle, is this conversation of resistance, is this conversation of just survival. And I think that’s what’s in a lot of ways attractive to individuals, ’cause they see themselves reflected.”94 Odums believes that the gallery speaks directly to people of color who live in New Orleans and walk through his spacious warehouse. In a story he told me and has repeated in various interviews, he stated: “There was a young man, like fourteen, we did a school tour, and the tour guide asked him, ‘Which one is your favorite painting?’ And he pointed to the one right there, the ‘alchemist’ one right there [the painting is of a young man wearing a T-­shirt] and they asked him why, and he said, ‘’Cause it looks like me.’”95 That visual racial politics led him to paint on the warehouse a large, dynamic painting of a young Black girl with a halo sun behind her head. The area still has a few warehouses tagged by local legends such as You Go Girl and READ, but buildings now house specialty coffee shops, bars, and loft-­style apartments. With his large mural, Cummings’s warehouse is distinct in its portrayal of a young Black girl. Odums is aware of his slippery situation: “I know how political it is for me to paint in this neighborhood that’s been gentrified, that’s now predominantly white. I understand how important it is for me to paint a Black girl on a series of buildings. One of the biggest images you’re gonna see in this city is this young Black girl. And yes it’s a pretty picture, it’s pretty colors, but in a way, overtly it’s political, overtly it’s a reminder. It’s about identity.”96 He continues describing the importance of this Black girl in Bywater at this particular moment: “It’s a pretty image. It’s a beautiful girl on a building, and it stops everybody in their tracks. They take a picture of it whether they acknowledge the political nature of it. And that’s important too. That’s what’s necessary as well. But I think for others it’s a way to . . . it’s almost like a high-­five. It’s a lot like an acknowledgment. Like someone’s trying to say ‘You’re not forgotten. You won’t be wiped away,’ you know? ‘Your name will remain.’”97 But will Bywater gentrification “wipe away” poor Black kids? The levee breaches affected poor Black people in the

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Mural on warehouse, Bywater, New Orleans by Brandan Odums (Bmike). Photo by John Lennon.

greatest numbers; as the city has “rebounded” and “rebranded,” poor, working-­class Black men and women are once again affected disproportionally. Brandan Odums spray-­painted Black Panther icons in a blighted housing project once home to Ruby Bridges; he has continued to paint these images on a warehouse owned by a developer who is partially responsible for the Bywater neighborhood’s gentrification.

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Rice Mill Lofts, train, Bywater, New Orleans. Photo by Phil Hauck.

branding the “ new ” new orleans At the center of the Bywater revitalization is the Reinventing the Crescent project, which includes a large park along the Mississippi River and has been approved by the City Council and Louisiana Recovery Authority.98 The project, according to its developers, is the “most important physical addition to New Orleans since the French Quarter.”99 Cummings and his father, also a real estate developer, bought land in the adjacent area when the younger Cummings chaired the New Orleans Building Corporation, an agency in charge of managing city-­owned properties—a move that many have considered a conflict of interest.100 Referring to the neighborhood in 1996 as a “green banana,” that same year Cummings bought the Rice Mill, a historical structure, built in 1892. In 2011, he spent $20 million to redesign it into lofts. Adjacent to Crescent Park, the Rice Mill building has stunning views of the Mississippi River.101 Cummings’s use of graffiti as a marketing ploy is one way graffiti has been reframed in the years after Katrina, rebranding the city for a new clientele.102 As he, along with the architect Wayne Troyer, planned to convert the mill into expensive lofts, the building was covered in graffiti both inside and out. Although he was initially upset by the tagging of his property, instead of erasing it, Cummings used it as a selling point. He highlighted certain graffiti in the building (not “the offensive ones,” as he told

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me in an interview): “We wanted to preserve it kind of in that rebel spirit” (interestingly, a phrase Odums used as well when referring to graffiti writers).103 Tenants who buy lofts in the Rice Mill are prohibited from removing or altering in any way the building’s original graffiti; it is part of the architecture, preserved as permanent artwork. The design concept worked. In 2012 the Rice Mill Lofts, with the large block-­lettering graffiti “you are beautiful” painted on its outer façade, was the most expensive per-­unit residential building in New Orleans. Cummings used graffiti to monetize the “rebel nature,” selling the concept to young professionals. It was therefore logical, and a good business model, for Cummings to subsidize Odums’s art and presence in the neighborhood. Much of Odums’s artwork questions the disappearance of low-­cost housing in the Bywater neighborhood. Those questions in post-­Katrina New Orleans, however, have seemingly been pushed to the side. In the approximately fifteen years since Hurricane Katrina, 85 percent of public housing has been shuttered and redeveloped into “mixed-­income” projects, displacing poor and working-­class families and leaving more than sixteen thousand families waiting for subsidized housing.104 Cummings’s plan for the Exhibit Be warehouse is to create a multiuse complex, with a small portion classified as affordable housing. A handful of those sixteen thousand families might find a place in the new proposed building, which is filled with Odums’s graffiti-­inspired, politicalized street art. If Cummings’s Rice Mill Lofts is any indication, though, the residents will mostly be people who can pay a monthly rent of at least $2,200 for a two-­ bedroom apartment. Subsidizing a Black artist to elevate his own project is certainly not new among developers looking to gentrify neighborhoods. As Megan French-­Marcelin states, “Partnerships like these wrap for-­profit enterprises in notions of collectivity and community artistry, disguising their core aims.”105 Sponsoring a Black artist in a time of neighborhood transition can perhaps be lauded in some ways, but clearly the end goal is to gentrify, removing the actual working-­class Black people reflected in Odums’s artwork. Odums is not naïve to the pressures he faces as he tries to produce (and earn money from) his activist art. Conscious of the partnership he joined, in my conversation with him, Odums saw a greater good in what was transpiring in Exhibit Be, arguing that his partnership with Cummings has led to a larger public art revitalization in New Orleans. He is optimistic that these artist-­entrepreneur partnerships will create future opportunities for others. “There’s already more public art in the city, more invitations to do public art, more developers and business owners and property owners who are less afraid of working with street artists.”106 In Odums’s

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assessment, there is a mutual benefit for developers to pay artists to beautify their properties and for artists to use developers for money and wall space. Not everyone, though, considers this type of relationship as acceptable as Odums does. Matt Sakakeeny argues that such relationships between artists and developers are uneven: “The playing field is not level, and there is no way out of the game.”107 While Cummings might appear to be the hip developer rebuilding New Orleans post-­Katrina (as Cummings stated to me, he is the only developer he knows who does not have a country club membership), as a Black man working for a rich white man, Odums’s status in the community is more precarious. The price for this partnership has not been fully apparent for Odums, or for a community in transition. That there is no alternative to these uneven relationships is a common sentiment among other New Orleans artists. Skylar Fein, a former UNO medical school student who became a full-­time artist in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, has also worked with Sean Cummings, although as a white artist, Fein’s relationship with Cummings is different from that of Odums. Fein criticizes those who think Odums is “selling out”; in Fein’s view, there is no other way to make art in New Orleans. Gentrification is happening, and everyone—including himself—is liable: We all want to make a monster out of somebody else to preserve our own moral virginity. And that’s nice, but my cherry was popped long ago. And all those young punks or white activists who want to make a monster out of somebody else, whether it’s Sean Cummings or whomever, it’s like, gentrification doesn’t require Sean Cummings. . . . The only people who require Sean Cummings are the young white activists. Because we need what they sometimes call the big “Other.” Or the “bad father.” It’s so nice to have the bad father so you can say, “If we can just knock this mother fucker off, then our potential would be suddenly unlimited to create this kind of liberated enlightened free society.” 108

Fein pinpoints the hypocrisy of transplant white activist artists who argue about preserving New Orleans “culture” while shopping in the newly opened St. Roch Market. St. Roch Market is an extension of Cummings’s vision of the “new” New Orleans. The market, which received a $3.1 million subsidy by a Department of Housing and Urban Development Disaster Community Development Block Grant to revitalize it after Hurricane Katrina, is supposed to use 70 percent of its retail space for “activities that benefit low- and moderate-­income persons.” Instead of a community market selling groceries, however, patrons can order $55 “Gulf Seafood

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Towers” at the Elysian Oyster Bar and wash it down with a “Jamaican-­ inspired” specialty drink, the “Anti-­Inflammatory,” at the Mayhaw.109 It might be open to the community, but the market sells its products to a particular clientele. Two weeks after the market opened, “Yuppy = Bad” was spray-­painted in pink on the landmark building.110 The graffiti was quickly removed, and the market has remained. The St. Roch Market is a few blocks from a dilapidated KFC, across the street from a building covered in graffiti that houses Fein’s art studio. When he arrived in New Orleans a week before Katrina hit, Fein wasn’t planning on working as an artist. He was born in New York’s Greenwich Village but raised in the Bronx. Both of his parents were teachers, and he was teased as a youth for being political—he joined the Socialist Party when he was twelve and traveled to the then Soviet Union in his twenties to understand communism. He held several jobs, stringing type for the New York Times, working with the Quakers to teach nonviolent resistance, being employed as a baker in Seattle. In August 2005, while getting ready for classes to begin at UNO, he found himself with his partner living in the working-­class section of Rampart Street, watching news reports of the hurricane heading their way. Intent on “riding out” the storm, after a neighbor offered them a gun to protect themselves if they stayed, they decided to head for Memphis. Fein returned a few weeks after the storm. As he went through his first year of medical school, he began making art in his backyard from the debris he collected in the streets. One of his creations was a kitchen table, and when a neighbor saw it, he offered to buy it if Fein removed the legs so he could hang it on his wall. Others began asking for reclaimed art for their own walls: “People got that it was made from the destruction of the city. NOLA got it right away. But it was a way to contain: you could have the destruction in your house. It was beautiful, it was contained, and it was a way of remembering that—paying homage to that—without getting too depressed by it.”111 Fein became interested in the graffiti scene around him. He never thought of himself as a graffiti writer—when he was in the Northwest, he had spent a few years as a stencil artist, but he was more interested in political writing than the graffiti writers he met who spent night after night tagging their own names. But after Katrina, New Orleans was “wide open” for graffiti writers, and Fein became connected to the graffiti subculture.112 When he landed a show at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 2009, he created five-­foot-­tall letters reading “harsh,” custom made with light bulbs to literally spotlight graffiti’s role in New Orleans.113 For the artist, post-­Katrina was the “golden age of Harsh.”114 There was, though, a divide between art that people bought tickets to

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see in a museum and vandalism that people objected to in the streets. While Fein stated that Harsh captured the zeitgeist of New Orleans when Katrina hit, as the city began rebuilding in the post-­Katrina landscape, unsanctioned graffiti—whether or not it captured the pulse of the city— was illegal. For example, during a listening tour from his constituents, a resident of River Garden told the New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu that the “Harsh” tag in his neighborhood needed to be removed. “I look up and see harsh on the Mayo Clinic. And it is harsh because it is bringing down my property values.”115 As the Crescent City lumbers into a postconflict state, “harsh” refers no longer to a city destroyed but to real estate’s bottom line. But for Fein, this unsanctioned graffiti is vital in the post-­Katrina landscape. In his manifesto “Why We Write,” Fein argues for graffiti’s radical power as a tool to fight capitalism: “Graffiti is the spontaneous negative product of a society based on stolen property. In the cathedral of commerce, it is an obscenity shouted from the cheap seats at the most solemn moment of an unbearable service. Those who produce it are an affront to the economic system: their work, though prized, cannot be bought, and their labor, though expert, cannot be hired. Their thievery reveals the theft at the heart of the current order. We should be thanking them for their generosity in stealing it back only temporarily.” Brandan Odums believes that working with financial backers like Sean Cummings is necessary to harness graffiti’s power and give writers and artists a worthy “cause”; Fein believes the action of graffiti is cause enough. Fein views graffiti as revolutionary not because writers are spraying political screeds or have a particular message. Rather, it is the lack of an overt political agenda that allows graffiti writers to be key players in an unintended battle against capitalism. As he states, “They lack theory, they lack a revolutionary alphabet, and this lack is almost their entire platform.”116 Because graffiti is written on buildings that do not belong to the writers, Fein is updating the scholar Kurt Iveson’s belief that “graffiti attacks the property relation,” and by disrupting this relation, the writers are—whether purposefully or not—attacking a core tenet of capitalism.117 When people examine unsanctioned graffiti in a city recuperating from a devastating hit, they (uncomfortably) understand that this writing is outside of a capitalistic framework of buying and selling. Graffiti may be about “ego,” but it is the placement of the tag or drawing, denuded of commercialism and the capitalist enterprise, that is potentially dangerous. Graffiti writers are “immature” and “antisocial,” offering “a nihilistic attack on the forces of order.”118 With a can of spray paint and no desire for financial profit, therefore, their marks

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are warning signs of a David versus Goliath fight. Theirs is a battle with “the ultimate stage of capitalism versus its equally modernized negation,” and Fein overtly calls for violence against the capitalists. “Your system is racing to its own destruction, and we have the advantage: we expect nothing from it. As the reigning order disintegrates, we have no interest in helping you pick up the pieces. We’re going to finish smashing them. It’s on.”119 He speaks in violent terms; this is no game and lives are at stake. Fein, despite using the “we” in his manifesto, blames himself for working as an artist in the machinations of capitalism: “Look. Look at me in this studio making art. It’s proof. I’m the one. I’m the problem. But it’s not just me, it’s all of us. . . . Oh, fuck it, man. It’s us. We’re all capitalism. We’re carrying it in our bones and our brains.” For Fein, graffiti writers exist outside the orbit of capitalism, and through their attacks on private property, they place their bodies on the line. Romantically looking at graffiti writers, he states: “They’re the last ones. They’re the only artists who don’t serve capital. . . . It is just so resistant to that form.”120 Fein, who has partnered with Sean Cummings to place a legal graffiti wall outside of the Rice Mill Lofts, finds himself complicit in Bywater’s gentrification. As a working artist who overtly and covertly interacts with the effects of capitalism in his art, Fein is not naïve; he knows he is firmly within its grasp. But for him, illegal graffiti offers a revolutionary path that is outside of what is transpiring in New Orleans. Billy, mentioned earlier, who makes his living as a tattoo artist and does not make any money through graffiti, is more vulgar in his view of the “rape” of New Orleans by those who use graffiti to sell it to the highest bidder: “It’s like, ‘We’re going to fuck you, but look at this pretty picture.’”121 Who, though, is the “you” in Billy’s statement? After Katrina’s devastation and the forced migration of many poor Black people from the city, Mayor Ray Nagin stated that New Orleans will always be a “chocolate city.”122 However, with an influx of white people with capital, Billy states that he is no longer part of a majority-­minority population. Black people have not returned in the same numbers, and more wealthy whites are entering the city, often buying properties and then renting them to tourists on sites such as Airbnb.123 Developers welcome this change. Pres Kabacoff, another New Orleanian developer whose company HRI Properties has assets in Bywater and, like Cummings, has used government subsidies to “revitalize” neighborhoods, assessed the fate of Black people in post-­Katrina New Orleans: “In terms of race, Black people in this town have less money. When neighborhoods revitalize, I think it chases all the poor out, and

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Anti-­Airbnb poster, graffiti, Marigny, New Orleans. Photo by John Lennon.

in our city the poor are almost all Black, so it’s more a coincidence. And there is probably some racism involved in that.”124 A gentrifying New Orleans spurred on by governmental “revitalizing” subsidies is “probably,” as Kabacoff admits, an outcome of “some racism.” Although Fein may believe that “it’s on” and that the battle against capitalism is being waged by graffiti writers, as sanctioned graffiti is being promoted by hip developers and illegal graffiti is erased by government employees, the competing armies are completely unmatched.

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• This chapter has detailed ways that graffiti and bodies were framed in post-­Katrina New Orleans. When Katrina hit and the effects of decades of racially biased neoliberal policies became apparent, the Big Easy was framed as a war zone and the victims as refugees or thugs. A crisis turned into a conflict, with the lines clearly drawn. Graffiti helped reframe the conversation, and even though the messages were often desperate or vulgar, the voices contrasted with state and media narratives. As Alderman and Ward state, communities contain multiple interests and identities, and in the years since the levees broke on that August day in 2005, these interests and identities have continued to be pitted against one another, with a rebranded city hanging in the balance. As graffiti becomes less of a communications device and more of an aesthetic artifact, a new city identity is taking hold.

5 : “FOR MORE THAN PROFIT” graffiti, street art, and the gentrification of detroit

When much of Detroit burned down in an 1805 fire, a local priest, Father Richard Gabriel, stated: “Speramus meloria, resurget cineribus. We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes.”1 It wouldn’t be the last time Detroit erupted in flames. With each successive destruction, there has always been an accompanying desire to rebuild and rebrand, an embrace of a hope for future possibilities. This hope found purchase in the middle of the twentieth century as the city rebounded from the Great Depression. As Europe lay in ashes from World War II, Detroit rose as a manufacturing powerhouse. Building machines for the war effort and then cars for returning soldiers, Detroit became a (white) working man’s ideal place: middle-­class respectability emerged as men worked in factories, drove home in their cars, and parked in front of their single-­family homes. Detroit’s roads are long and wide, veins entering the heart of downtown before flowing outward into the various neighborhoods. In a city of automakers, daily commutes advertised the products the workers had built themselves. In Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s documentary Detropia (2012), the archival footage of Detroit in the 1950s purports a city of workers building the American dream. The American dream, though, was not accessible to all. As Black people moved to the North to find factory work, they encountered discriminatory hiring practices and housing polices officially and unofficially in place. Smoldering from toxic race relations for decades, in 1943, the Black Bottom neighborhood burned in a race riot, placing the whole city on edge. Over the following two decades, thousands of buildings were condemned, clearing “urban blight” and making way for the Chrysler Freeway and Lafayette Park—a mixed-­use “urban renewal” project that featured apartments the former Black Bottom residents could not afford. Many former

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residents moved to different Black-­centered neighborhoods, including the Twelfth Street area, a poor neighborhood that later erupted in flames in 1967.2 As the city burned again, and then rebuilt itself again, the cycle of racist discrimination and civil uprising continued. Fire and race relations continued to be linked in the second half of the twentieth century. In the ashes of the 1960s riots, Coleman Young, a powerful African American mayor of Detroit for twenty years, rose to political power. White people fled the city in droves, moving into suburban neighborhoods, with Eight Mile Road marking a racial and economic dividing line. The result, according to Jerry Herron, is that Detroit is the “longest-­running disaster story in American history.” A story that is a “result of white not black decisions. It is the people who left, not the people left behind, who have created this place.”3 In the vacuum left by “white flight,” the city budget contracted; when Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law in 1994, city finances contracted further and never recovered. 53 percent of working-­age Detroit residents in 2014 were unemployed during the course of the year, and by the end of the first decade of the twenty-­first century, one in every twenty-­ five adults (and one in seven in some sections of the Eastside) was either in jail or under correctional control.4 Systemic racism has a long history in Detroit, as do stunning moments of racial violence. In a case illustrating the entwining of both, in 1982, Vincent Chin was beaten to death by two white men: Ronald Ebens, a Chrysler foreman, and his stepson Michael Nitz, an unemployed autoworker. They mistook the Chinese American as a Japanese “motherfucker” who “took white peoples’ jobs,” as Ebens allegedly yelled at Chin right before he slammed a baseball bat into his head. In a further injustice, the two white men, described by the judge at the trial as “family men,” pleaded to manslaughter and received only three years’ probation.5 On July 18, 2013, this city of continual racial and economic conflict, and carrying an estimated debt of $18 billion to $20 billion, filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the largest municipality bankruptcy filing in US history. Although no flames ripped through the city streets on that hot summer day, bankruptcy brought austerity measures and economic “new visions” forcing, once again, a new Detroit to be forged from the decaying detritus of the old. This chapter explores ways in which these new visions are fashioned, centering attention on the way graffiti and street art play an active role in rebranding Detroit for investors and young entrepreneurs ready for a stylized adventure.

“For More Than Profit” : 171

the neoliberal aesthetic: embracing street art globally As discussed in the previous chapter, Sean Cummings is a New Orleans real estate entrepreneur who uses graffiti to sell a “new,” post-­Katrina New Orleans. He is unoriginal, though, in his calculated use of graffiti and street art to gentrify a neighborhood he has a financial stake in— he’s just very good at it. Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is one of many other examples in the twenty-­first century where a multiethnic working-­class neighborhood filled with graffiti-­covered warehouses transformed into a gentrified street-­art mecca of specialty coffee roasters, microbreweries, and high-­priced converted loft spaces.6 The rebranding effort of moving from graffiti to street art is not linear, but there is an amorphous tipping point between the two. When I lived in Greenpoint, a neighborhood that gentrified around me, there was a categorical difference between “street art,” as done by the likes of Banksy who visited my neighborhood on a clandestine US tour, and “graffiti,” as sprayed by Miss 17, a tagger who lived in Greenpoint. The former was seen as “art”; the Banksy image was placed on an advertisement to sell a newly constructed high-­end apartment building in the neighborhood. The latter was seen as dirt, visually connected to poverty and gangs.7 This well-­used road map of remaking a neighborhood through street art, rebranding it as a place where tourists want to visit and then eventually buy into (with the consequential eviction of poor and working-­class people) is an integral part of the “new” Detroit. It is not, however, always a smooth transition. The gradual violence enacted on Detroit’s citizens through the erosion of infrastructure, jobs, public welfare, and unions has been brutal. To remake the city’s image in the national and international landscape after a well-­publicized bankruptcy, city planners are doubling down on what Richard Ford has described as “creative capital” by using art to rebrand the city as “Detroit 2.0,” marketing the city as evolved, safe, and open for business. My last chapter began with the spray-­painted pleas written by those desperately attempting to survive the aftermath of a hurricane and concluded with a rich, white real estate developer using graffiti to sell a gentrifying version of New Orleans. This chapter begins at that moment of gentrification, discussing the ways that developers have used graffiti and street art to radically transform Detroit. It is not, though, a straightforward narrative. I contextualize ways governments from around the world have embraced street art to “improve” city infrastructures, while detailing how graffiti has been weaponized to resist the erasure of poor, marginalized individuals from neighborhoods. In Detroit, the paint on the walls is a proxy battle in the larger racial and class divide of the city.

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Mural on Eastern Market, Detroit by FEL3000FT. Photo by John Lennon.

One of the most successful attempts to rebrand a Detroit neighborhood, almost entirely through street art, is the restoration of Eastern Market, a historical landmark located one mile northeast of downtown. Located on forty-­three acres of land, the first “sales sheds” were established in 1891, devoted to selling hay and wood. The market continued to grow. After World War II, it became a hub for wholesale food vendors, with six blocks of open-­air merchants selling their wares, surrounded by more than eighty buildings and warehouses.8 Like many places in Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s, though, the area was in decline, with the neighborhood viewed as a violent place filled with homelessness, drug addicts, and petty crime. For graffiti writers unafraid to enter the area, it was also a prime spot to paint. While graffiti is often perceived as a visual marker of a declining neighborhood, street art can often lead to a neighborhood’s “revitalization.” As part of a larger effort to remake the downtown area, a Detroit-­based art publisher, 1XRun (“one-­time run”), teamed with local businesses to rebrand Eastern Market.9 In 2014, 1XRun received permission to make an open-­air gallery of street art with the goal of generating foot traffic. Starting with a budget of $125,000, Roula David, the chief operating officer for 1XRun, along with David Carmody, president of Eastern Market Corporation, commissioned local and international artists to paint the walls in bright, eye-­catching colors. The event was successful and dur-

“For More Than Profit” : 173

ing the annual “Murals in the Market” event, more than fifty new murals were painted simultaneously, often with the whole edifice of a building covered in a particular artwork.10 Carmody explains the value of the murals: “In Eastern Market, people are using these murals as a backdrop for their wedding photos, for their graduation photos, for really important passages for their life.”11 More important, after they take their photos, they’re entering into these newly opened, art-­wrapped neighborhood stores and restaurants. Carmody articulated a strict divide between mural art and graffiti vandalism: “The murals are a great way to make something interesting that isn’t. When we first began the mural project, we were having a challenge with graffiti. Once the art goes up, taggers don’t feel like defacing it. It makes the market feel more cared for and safer.”12 As the business district manager, Carmody makes aesthetic judgments based on financial incentives. The murals themselves are a mash-­up of goofy alien creatures and political race-­related images; a guided walking tour reveals the stories behind each one. Other corporate-­backed artist spaces have subsequently opened in the neighborhood, including the Red Bull House of Art, which offers residencies and gallery space to visual artists.13 Stated simply, mural art is a boon for Eastern Market, and street art has spread outward from the downtown region. In the 2018 rendition, 1XRun, along with the Small Business Mural Project by Quicken Loans Family of Businesses, expanded its reach with ten local artists painting on small businesses in six Detroit neighborhoods. As the art spreads, the hope is that eager shoppers will feel safe entering those neighborhoods. According to its corporate website, Quicken Loans’ interest in street art is as a “for more than profit” enterprise.14 The company is owned by Dan Gilbert, the multibillionaire businessman whose name is synonymous with the revitalization of downtown Detroit. I’ll return to his influence in the city later in this chapter, but “for more than profit” is a central tenet of the “new” post-­bankruptcy Detroit that consciously uses street art to aid in the gentrification of working-­class, often minority neighborhoods, transforming them into something, as the ad copy states, “more.” Beyond a catchy public relations phrase, “for more than profit” underscores how street art serves the needs of capital. Graffiti has a history of antiauthority rebelliousness in which socioeconomic outsiders illegally secreted their way into areas where they didn’t belong. “Bombing,” after all, is one of the militaristic terms used to describe illegally catching a tag on someone else’s property. The “profit” is in the fame one receives from hitting as many buildings as one can. Gilbert’s company’s use of the term for more than profit lays bare that street art serves capital, and the profit the company receives is paramount to underwrite the whole

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enterprise. The “more” of the term is ambiguous (more what exactly?), but the profit motive anchoring the phrase is clear. In urban areas, graffiti makes visible the lives of those who have been rendered invisible; street art is used to bolster the value of the properties lining the streets of the city. Graffiti reveal a city’s economic disparity, whereas street art wraps buildings in images hiding those divested lives. Graffiti is born of conflict, whereas developers use street art to transition a neighborhood into something “more.” Regardless of the content, street art is made safe through its inclusion in the city’s economic revitalization plans. There is a dialogic relationship between the two; “safe” art makes one feel as if the streets are “safe,” and vice versa. At its worst, street art, according to the artist Lutz Henke, goes hand in hand with gentrification, killing off organic energetic creative spaces and defiling the city’s corpse with its murals, “artificially reanimating the creativity it has displaced, thus producing the ‘undead city.’” These “zombie” city spaces create “an amusement park for those who can afford the rising rents,” displacing those who can’t.15 If the sheer number of city street-­art tours is any indication, there’s a ton of zombie cities throughout the world, and the virus is spreading. Contextualizing how other international cities have embraced legal street art to combat illegal graffiti illustrates the ways Detroit’s gentrification is following a rehearsed script. São Paulo, for example, embraces street art to combat the widespread tagging called pixação (or pichação), a text-­ based graffiti (without pictures or figures) formed using straight lines and sharp edges. Pixação writers eschew color with black, almost tarlike paint covering the facades of buildings. The style emerged in the 1980s, heavily influenced by the typeface of album covers of popular bands such as Judas Priest and AC/DC. The ancient, gothic or pagan inspired lettering is rigidly angular. While pixadores’ writing is unique in comparison to other taggers around the world, what has made pixação particularly notable is the extreme daring of the participants, who risk their lives to hit downtown skyscrapers. Janela de prédio (building window) is the “art” of pixadores, which entails individuals climbing the facade of a large building, floor by floor. Escalada (“buildering”) is an even more extreme climbing technique in which pixadores climb the surge arrester cable, a device covering electrical equipment on the outside of buildings, to hang precariously over the city streets to catch their tag.16 Much like US graffiti, pixação is viewed as visual pollution, or sujerta (dirt), and “city authorities, as well as private real estate owners, make enormous efforts to combat pixação through harsh ‘zero-­tolerance’ policing, legally prosecuting writers and large grey-­scale painting.”17 Pixação is most often located in downtown areas—the central business district—

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Pixação on building, São Paulo, Brazil. Photo by Ray Schwartz.

with graffiti writers entering from surrounding poorer neighborhoods and meeting up as crews before climbing seemingly impossible heights. The aesthetic quality of pixação is linked with the perceived danger of getting up; the black latex ink using ancient lettering on skyscrapers offers an arresting contrast to the cityscape supposedly symbolizing São Paulo as a modern “global city.” While São Paulo has employed strict antigraffiti laws since the 1980s, like most zero-­tolerance policies, they have been ineffective. Discouraged, officials decided instead to decriminalize “graffiti.” The key, though, is how they define the term. The 2011 legal act 9605/98 categorizes graffiti as “performed with the objective to artistically valorize” a facade.18 Pixação, though, is illegal. As Roger Gastman, a US graffiti writer and chronicler of graffiti movements around the world, states clearly, “The people of Brazil . . . don’t have a problem with graffiti. It’s [pixação] they can’t stand.”19 Splitting graffiti (roughly equivalent to US “street art”) and pixação, municipalities valorize the former while criminalizing the latter. Graffiti murals are supported both financially and politically in an effort to “modernize” São Paulo into a global city whose artistic heritage, as mayor Fernando Haddad proudly announced, “is one of the biggest in the world.”20 As the city embraces neoliberal policies that privatize public resources, street art becomes the aesthetically pleasing advertising face enticing outsiders to the city.21 Supported by real estate developers and politicians, São Paulo has valorized street art in much the same way that it has been embraced in Eastern Market and downtown Detroit. Situating pixação’s qualities of resistance within Brazilian politics, the theorist Marcia Tiburi remixes Marx and Engels’s famous opening line to The Communist Manifesto, writing, “A specter is haunting Bra-

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zil: the specter of pixação.”22 The aura surrounding these old-­style letters on skyscrapers is one of discomfort, both aesthetically and in the perceived danger of the application. Tiburi refers to this graffiti style as an “aesthetic terrorism” that is “a shattering of the enclosed space” of São Paulo and has “the power to fragment the city dominated by white capitalists.”23 Pixação reminds viewers that that which is made invisible has the ability to reemerge to great heights. The blots of white paint officials use to erase pixação are representations, for Tiburi, of the whiteness financing the city; São Paulo’s street art, therefore, connects to other gentrifying art scenes of emerging global cities. Pixação, however, links Brazil’s urban poor with other international disenfranchised communities who have illegally claimed space on their cities’ walls. By conjuring Marx and Engels, Tiburi underlines the politics in pixação’s ghostlike haunting: when erased by city officials, it reemerges in another part of the city, eerily showing itself on sides of buildings where it seems the writings could not have been humanly placed.24 São Paulo has been successful embracing “good” street art to rebrand a city, but it certainly wasn’t the first one to do so. As São Paulo was just beginning its fight against pixação, Philadelphia was embracing graffiti muralism as early as 1984 as a part of the Philadelphia Anti-­Graffiti Network run by Mayor Wilson Goode. Philadelphia—the birthplace of US modern graffiti—has been trying to stop illegal graffiti from the time Cornbread began tagging the city to impress a high school girlfriend in the 1960s.25 One of the longest-­lasting graffiti-­to-­mural arts programs in the United States, Philadelphia Anti-­Graffiti Network was conceived with the intention to eradicate graffiti. When the artist Jane Golden was hired to direct the network, though, instead of ostracizing graffiti writers, she “legitimized” them by pushing the writers into legally funded art projects. To emphasize the difference between vandal and artist, though, in 1997 the program was removed from the Anti-­Graffiti Network and combined with the private nonprofit Philadelphia Mural Arts Advocates, becoming its own entity, Mural Arts Philadelphia. Murals are extremely popular throughout Philadelphia, bringing tourists into the city. For example, the same year it became a nonprofit, Prince Charles of Wales and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, spent the day on a well-­publicized graffiti mural tour. More than twenty years later, the program is very much alive, with new murals continuously emerging on the streets of Philadelphia in 2021. Street-­art tours of Philadelphia—like the ones in São Paulo, New York, London, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Krakow, Milan, and almost every other large metropolis—are popular attractions that bring people to city centers. Even though Mural Arts Philadelphia rebranded itself by separating from the Philadelphia Anti-­Graffiti Network thirteen years after its gene-

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sis, the program’s ideological base is still of replacement—murals and graffiti do not share the same city space. 26 Mural arts programs in Philadelphia, New Orleans, Detroit, and numerous other cities are embracing aesthetically market-­driven place making, which, as Alesia Montgomery writes, “suppresses and replaces cultures of resistance.”27 Neoliberal “place making” creates appealing locations within urban districts that interact with regional and global markets. While the 1970s and 1980s saw “white flight” from city centers and the consequential removal of public funding, in the present day, urban art connected to graffiti styles— though more legible to those not associated to the graffiti subculture—is used to bring back middle- and upper-­class white people. This strategy, Montgomery points out, is an example of urban neoliberalism based in racial capitalism. Building on the theories of Lester Spence, Anjan Chakravartty, and Ferreira da Silva, among others, Montgomery argues that neoliberal critics undertheorize the influence of racial politics, viewing neoliberalism in purely economic terms while failing to dialectically situate policies in race-­class struggles and violence.28 To resist “urban economic development” catering to bourgeoisie tastes and leading to the destruction of working-­class neighborhoods, Jamie Peck argues that local communities need to create opportunities for their own constituents instead of “bringing in culture” from the outside.29 Peck’s idea has been mostly ignored in Detroit. Downtown areas—once public places where minority activists demonstrated against systematic and incendiary racism—have now become havens for white middle- and upper-­class denizens. The legal street-­art scene in Detroit and other cities exposes a neoliberal racial politics that, though seemingly inclusive, is exclusive in its economic removal of the poor from neighborhoods. The archetype of this form of racial capitalism is Wynwood, Miami’s artistic entertainment neighborhood. Centered on street art, an arts and nightlife economy emerged in the early 2000s in this formerly Puerto Rican working-­class community. Raphael Schachter describes how Wynwood “art washed” the local community: “Many locals who had been living in the area since the 1950s felt not only alienated by the influx of ‘creatives’ and tourists attracted by the ‘edgy’ look and feel of their own streets, but felt estranged from their own neighbourhood due to the eradication of the genuinely local businesses, businesses that had provided not only employment but the very sense of community itself.”30 In Camila Alvarez and Natalie Edgar’s documentary Right to Wynwood, the directors interview the men and women who endured the race uprisings of the 1980s and 1990s and the consequential evisceration of jobs, public services, and infrastructure from the neighborhood, powerfully illustrating how this artistic “playground’s” foundation is the removal of

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these longtime residents. Alvarez and Edgar painfully peel back the neoliberal policies that have created the environment for real estate entrepreneurs such a David Lombardi, who states on camera, “I like to say I took chicken shit and made chicken salad in this neighborhood.”31 The excrement, of course, is the homes in which people once lived. Lombardi explains with pleasure how he evicted people from dilapidated houses because economically razed buildings make him more money than those that housed poor people. Lombardi is rightfully cast as a villain in the documentary, and his “more than profit” mentality emerges in his incendiary comments revealing a joy in others’ misery.32 Lombardi’s greed and toxic masculinity border on cartoonish. The film, though, specifically reveals how art is racially weaponized against the poor. As Schacter states, “The ‘avant-­garde’ artists working within these sites can thus be understood as a vanguard in the most traditional sense: they are the group who secure new ground at the forefront of an impending army, who advance, seek out the enemy and establish their demise.”33 The violent terminology of war is not hyperbole. For Schacter it is the “ugly truth” of “art-­washing” in the “creative city”; street art leads the way for a tourist invasion unsettling local communities before displacing them, erasing whole communities under globs of brightly colored paint. In his examination of Wynwood, Marcus Feldman argues that organic community-­based change empowering locals is possible with art leading this transformation. Wynwood developers, however, see art as a cudgel to knock down those in its way.34 Regardless of its implementation, the street-­art campaigns discussed here are part and parcel of racial capitalism’s rebranding of each of these cities. Each one, though, has different roots from which its street-­art scene grows. Unlike Miami or São Paulo, Detroit has a long history of muralism, with Diego Rivera’s fresco murals in the Detroit Institute of Arts being the most famous. But while Detroit’s cultural history and use of muralism is different from its Wynwood counterpart, the question remains as to whether the art is any less weaponized.

dan gilbert and the transformation of detroit “Detroit vs Everybody” is a popular slogan found on T-­shirts throughout the “new” Detroit. It’s a catchy phrase capturing a history of strong fighters with hometown pride—a statue of Joe Louis’s fists is a prominent feature of Detroit for a reason. But the rallying cry is not a simple statement; after all, who is “Detroit” and who is “everybody” else? As the city gentrifies, resulting in evictions for poor and working-­class families, the inclusion-­exclusion lines are blurred, if not outright manipulated. In the

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1950s, there were 1.8 million people living in Detroit; in 2014, there were only approximately 680,000 living in the city, with the white population changing from 84 percent at the midpoint of the twentieth century to less than 13 percent in the second decade of the twenty-­first century. Since the decline of Detroit’s automobile industry, there has been a radical change in demographics. To reverse this trend, a welcome mat has been rolled out for mostly white, professional young people who have found apartments and loft space in the gentrifying downtown area. This move seems to be working. In three years since the 2010 census was taken, the white population increased from seventy-­six thousand to eighty-­six thousand.35 With rents cheaper than in other cities and an environment welcoming entrepreneurial capital, downtown Detroit is rapidly gentrifying, with economic decisions to “save” Detroit wrapped up in aesthetic branding. For example, the high-­end watch company Shinola, heralded as the “coolest brand in America,” emphasizes “Made in Detroit” in its advertising campaigns.36 Highlighting their prosperous Detroit factory, the hope is that, as Stacy Perman states of the narrative the company is selling, “Every time customers purchase an $850 Shinola watch, they too can feel they’re doing their part in Detroit’s fight for survival.”37 The message seems to be working. When director Peter Farrelly won a 2019 Oscar for his film Green Book, he inexplicably gave a shout-­out to the owners of Shinola: “They’re saving Detroit!” It’s a preposterous statement, one that Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib angrily responded to on Twitter: “We just need the 1% to stop taking our land for nothing + shifting our tax dollars towards for-­profit development that makes them richer.”38 Tlaib is arguing against private companies “saving” a city by reaping financial benefits at the cost of taxpayers. Others, though, see “corporate welfare” as a way to rebuild the city. “Made in Detroit” is another lucratively popular marketing campaign for the “new” Detroit, found on clothing, city advertisements, and company taglines. From an advertising perspective, it’s a perfect phrase, nostalgically linking to the car-­making history of the city while also rooting people to a place. In Detroit, people and things are made; there is no birth right assigned in the slogan; rather, it’s an attitude that “makes” one from Detroit. What is being made—in terms of things and demographics—is transforming. Dan Gilbert, whom the Atlantic has called a “superhero” for rebuilding Detroit, is synonymous with the new downtown.39 He owns over ninety-­five buildings in the city and, with his Detroit-­savior status among corporate sponsors, has a large influence on government policy. Detroit began transitioning in 2010 when Gilbert moved his corporate headquarters of Quicken Loans to the One Campus Martius building in downtown. This move kick-­started Detroit’s rebranding, which, as Mark

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Jay and Philip Conklin state, went from a mecca of Fordism to a mecca of post-­Fordism.40 Downtown has been made over into what some locals have called “Gilbertville,” a place, as the New York Times reporter Reif Larsen explains, where “millennials take a break from beach volleyball to sip craft beer and nibble on artisan pickles.”41 While Larsen is making a joke at millennials’ expense, he is still unabashedly “giddy with possibilities,” arguing that the new twenty-­first-­century Detroit will have an aura of a pleasant bike ride with people “from all walks of life [and] all colors” happily riding together. Dan Gilbert’s real estate prowess has led to this optimistic hope in the city among white and Black leaders. Heaster Wheeler, for example, an executive director of the city’s NAACP branch, has rallied around the need for Black entrepreneurs, whom he dubs “Black Dan Gilberts.”42 In 2017, the New York Times labeled Detroit “The Most Exciting City in America.”43 A question, though, needs to be asked: exciting for whom? The hyperoptimistic view of Detroit is somewhat perplexing, as the contrast between downtown and the rest of the city is painstakingly apparent. One example of many: it is easy to find organic produce at the Jeff Bezos owned Whole Foods, but more than a hundred thousand residents in the surrounding metropolis have had their water shut off since 2013. As Jay and Conklin state, “Detroit has become a living illustration of one of the dynamics of capitalism, in which wealth accrues at one pole of society in direct proportion to the poverty and misery that concentrate at the other.”44 One way this pole is greased is that neighborhoods deemed “viable” for transformation receive resources diverted from other parts of the city. For example, the Detroit Future City strategic framework, a centerpiece for mayor Mike Duggan’s plan for revitalization, attempted “to shrink the city” using the resources allocated to these poorer neighborhoods to help pay the costs to invigorate “strategically important” areas.45 What makes a city “viable” to draw young, mostly white, tech-­savvy people to downtown? Safety is certainly one concern, and Gilbert has hired several hundred private security guards to police the downtown area, installing an intricate surveillance system with over five hundred cameras to protect people and property.46 Jobs are also certainly necessary, and the gig economy has allowed young entrepreneurs to embody the attitude emblazoned on a boutique clothing store that “Detroit Hustles Harder.” This rebranding is not just semantics—although the new Detroit certainly likes its T-­shirt ready slogans. It is the epitome of an extreme ideological change in the city’s makeup: at one point in Detroit’s history—after tremendous protracted fights between labor and management that cost the lives of workers—this was a union town. Now, it is a

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Ford Mustang GT mural, Eastern Market, Detroit. Photo by William Jensen.

city celebrating individualistic “hustling.” In 2019, Gilbert affectionately called Detroit “gritty” in his failed attempt to lure Amazon to build its second headquarters in the city. His idea of grit, though, is not the grit borne on the skin of a unionized factory worker but a sanitized, nostalgic view of grit turned into an advertising slogan. One way to advertise this aestheticized “grit” to welcome young transplants to Detroit is through street art, which the city has enthusiastically embraced. The Detroit Mural Project has documented more than a thousand images of murals throughout the city, with more than two hundred in the downtown area.47 Styles and subject matter are not uniform, as there are numerous types of images adorning the outside of buildings, from Kobie Solomon’s huge chimera on Clay Avenue (the mechanical lion is featured on the label for Stroh Brewery’s Perseverance IPA) to Ellen Rutt’s cubist-­inspired mural on the Vernor Highway.48 As each new neighborhood begins to gentrify, street art often leads the way. Walking through the Dequindre Cut Greenway on a midweek summer night in 2017, for example, I was surprised that this once notorious hangout spot has transformed into an open-­air museum with sanctioned graffiti and murals on every one of the numerous underpasses. Like Eastern Market, art draws tourists into an area; in what was once considered an empty and dangerous spot, bike riders now leisurely pedal along the well-­ maintained path.49 Graffiti aesthetics are interlinked with capital—safe art implies safe streets. In this way, legal, outdoor graffiti mural art helps define the neighborhood as an innocuous place to spend money. Gilbert

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is betting heavily on this sanctioned wave of street art to wash away the remains of the “old” bankrupt Detroit and paint a “new” Detroit with eye-­ popping colorful images. There are many examples of how Gilbert’s “grit” sells the “new” Detroit but the Z garage may be the most absurd (plate 13). The garage is a ten-­ story, half-­million-­square-­foot parking garage with 1,300 parking spots and murals by twenty-­seven international graffiti and street artists from Australia, Greece, Mexico, Ukraine, and Switzerland. Bedrock Detroit, the largest commercial developer in downtown Detroit, with more than a hundred commercial properties, boasts that the Z is “unlike any parking structure in the world” and “ignites” the downtown area. Dodging cars while walking the many levels of the Z, I checked out the murals. Some have wildstyle lettering, others have weird depictions of alien worlds, and still others are more realistic renderings. They all, though, are spectacle. Hearing music from the bars adorning the similarly pretentiously named commercial alleyway “The Belt” located directly at the rear of the parking structure, the attempt to rebrand a practical space into an “experience” is obvious. Far from feeling organic, though, the space feels like what it actually is: a parking garage with some cool designs. There is no connection between the murals and the downtown specifically or to Detroit in general. Detroit used to pride itself on a working-­class culture that built cars; now the city is being “ignited” by a commercial real estate company that allows you to park near art-­covered walls for twenty-­five dollars a day, Monday through Friday (more during events). Graffiti is, of course, not new to parking garages—graffiti writers often tag these structures. But the Z put the spotlight on graffiti, giving 130 walls to “star” international street artists to make the garage a “destination,” or, as billed by Visit Detroit, “an artists’ United Nations of parking structures.”50 In 2013, the city sold the parking garage to Dan Gilbert’s company for a dollar. It is part of his large collection of at least sixty-­ two buildings and seventeen thousand parking spots Gilbert has bought since 2011, which he spent over $421 million to purchase.51 These buildings—like the Z garage—were bought from the city or previous investors struggling through the Great Recession. As someone with deep pockets and a sustained vision of what the downtown area should become, Gilbert bought the properties, invested heavily in their reconstruction, and found tenants quickly. Graffiti and street art make these buildings more lucrative, and Gilbert is certainly willing to pay to have his buildings art wrapped by the most famous street artists in the world. Gilbert’s Bedrock Real Estate Services (along with Library Street Collective and MeridianHealth) paid Shepard Fairey to paint the largest mural the artist to this point has ever done—an

Plate 13 Z garage, Shepard Fairey mural, Detroit. Photo by Richard Hedrick.

Plate 14 Mural by Sintex, Detroit. Photo by Chris Freitag.

Plate 15 Dot house, Heidelberg Street, Detroit. Mural by Tyree Guyton. Photo by John Lennon.

Plate 16 Women of Color Part 2 mural, Baton Rouge. Mural by Rahmaan Statik Barnes. Photo by Kevin Harris.

Plate 17 H. Rap Brown ( Jamil Abdullah Al-­Amin), match, Baton Rouge. Mural by Chemis. Photo by John Lennon.

Plate 18 Alton Sterling mural, convenience store, people, Baton Rouge. Mural by Jo Hines. Photo by Mark Wallheiser/Getty.

Plate 19 “Make the Rich Pay for COVID-­19” graffiti, lamp, crosswalk, London. Photo by Ian Roberts.

Plate 20 “Defund the Police” mural, street, trees, Washington, DC. Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty.

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eighteen-­story painting on the tax-­subsidized headquarters of Quicken Loans (which Gilbert’s company, along with MeridianHealth, owns). The 184-­foot-­by-­60-­foot mural is an arresting image to anyone heading downtown; in red- and cream-­colored geometric shapes, the mural has André the Giant in a central five-­pointed star amid a peace sign and lotus leaves. Its sharp, clear design towers over downtown Detroit and, although the connection of the former wrestler to the scales of justice painted above him are not easily discernable, there is no mistaking the value of street art to this area. The mural is part of Detroit place making; anyone heading into the city center sees the mural and Gilbert’s building, anchoring the business district while creating an art-­focused hip downtown area. Galleries, coffee shops, and cocktail bars all have legal street art, graffiti, or murals adorning either the inside or the outside of their establishments. This is the new Detroit: you can park your car in a Gilbert-­owned parking garage with international street art, go to work in a large Gilbert-­owned building art wrapped by Shepard Fairey, and then head to the Belt to have a drink surrounded by more art. To be clear, this is all legally sanctioned graffiti—permits are granted. While he was in Detroit on commission, though, Fairey also painted other walls without permission. Consequently, the police issued a warrant for his arrest when they discovered eighteen of Fairey’s illegal wheat-­paste posters (many were of his iconic André the Giant) throughout downtown, East Jefferson, and Midtown. Fairey stated in interviews before he arrived to paint Gilbert’s building that he was also going to do illegal graffiti while in the city. The police, therefore, charged Fairey with two counts of malicious destruction felonies for causing approximately $24,000 in damages to the cash-­strapped city, with the potential of landing him in jail for up to five years.52 Fairey’s case epitomizes the “new” Detroit: it celebrates legal street art that wraps around buildings bought cheaply by developers who have a vision for a sanitized “gritty” Detroit that, like Fairey’s sharp-­edge designs, is actually extremely clean. The prosecuting city attorney told reporters that Detroit’s new graffiti policy “has successfully prosecuted approximately 30 graffiti cases in the past 2 1/ 2 years as part of an overall effort to clean up blight. . . . Mr. Fairey is not entitled to special treatment over ordinary citizens just because he is famous.”53 Except, of course, he is. A judge dismissed the case against the star of the street-­art world who attracted worldwide acclaim for his Obama poster Hope. Fairey—much like Banksy—holds a tenuous position in the world of street art and graffiti, especially after his Obama image received so much attention. Embracing a neoliberal mainstream political candidate, Fairey has been accused of “obeying” the system that he has seemingly railed against since

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he first started putting up posters when he was a design student in Rhode Island: “I gained a new audience and lost a lot of the old. I was seen as sucking up to the evil system.”54 Detroit’s graffiti and street-­art scene is based on capital; the market, intertwined with the legal system, decides value. Fairey could go free; it certainly appears that this white, rich, well-­known street art star did not receive the same treatment as would graffiti writers catching their tags on Six Mile. Rick Manore, founder of the now-­closed CPop Gallery, stated: “[Fairey] wears his warrants on his sleeve like badges of honor. He’s using the judicial system and the media to market himself. It’s a minor investment and in return his name stays relevant. He’s been doing this for years, and he’s great at it.”55 This line between legal and illegal graffiti is somewhat invisible but carefully patrolled and continuously negotiated.

graffiti wars Dan Gilbert’s “igniting” of downtown with a graffiti-­covered parking garage or paying for a 184-­foot mural on the side of his building has been a beacon for younger people interested in living, as one white twentysomething sneaker entrepreneur confided to me in a bar in Corktown, “in the wild frontier.” From a business perspective, street art is an innocuous balm soothing the transition from a neighborhood in conflict to an economically thriving neighborhood. This alteration does not, though, always succeed. When it fails, the wounds created by racialized capitalism are reopened. Street art is being celebrated as helping to create “Detroit 2.0;” however, in a poor, Black community along Grand River Avenue, gentrification has not gone according to plan. Instead of specialty pop-­up stores dotting the street, a very public “graffiti war” commenced after a Black graffiti writer and a white real estate entrepreneur fought over a graffiti mural depicting a murdered Asian American man. The fight spilled from the walls to the street to the larger Detroit area, uncovering the racial underpinnings involved as a neighborhood attempted to transition to something “more.” The origins of the graffiti war began in 2013, when Derek Weaver, a twenty-­six-­year-­old white man from Monroe County and recent business graduate from Wayne State University, attempted to become a real estate entrepreneur. As one of his first jobs, he was hired as a manager to help transform 4731 Gallery, a four-­story building with thirty-­one studio spaces and a large first-­floor gallery. Although not an art aficionado—he fully admits he didn’t know the difference between “an oil painting or a graffiti piece”—he envisioned the half-­mile section on Grand River between Rosa Parks Boulevard and Warren Avenue as ripe for revitaliza-

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tion.56 Weaver wanted this neighborhood to follow Eastern Market and the nearby areas of Corktown and Woodbridge that have seen a rise in property values. He cut the rents in the building to decrease the turnover rate, bringing in artist-­entrepreneurs to create small enterprises and businesses including tattoo parlors, a church, and graphic design shops. Weaver endeavored to rebrand the neighborhood around him. He contacted Sintex, an African American Detroit-­born graffiti writer, to place a mural on the front of the building. People in the neighborhood were receptive (with some coming from outside the neighborhood to look at the piece). Weaver then set his sights on rebranding the dilapidated storefronts along Grand River Avenue that a local reporter derogatively described as “a hot mess of asphalt.”57 Using artists from the nearby College of the Creative Arts to enact his vision, Weaver created the Grand River Creative Corridor (GRCC). Using local graffiti writers and street artists such as Kobie Solomon, Malt, FEL3000ft, Tead, Halima Cassells, Sydney G. James, and Alonzo Steve, Weaver built on Sintex’s relationships with local artists to help transform his status from the “wealthy country club guy” to a community organizer.58 Like David Carmody, the manager at Eastern Market, Weaver instinctively recognized the legal and perceptive divide between “street art” and “graffiti.” In an interview about his vision of the GRCC, Weaver is explicit, stating graffiti writers who don’t seek permission are “vandals,” but through his negotiation with them and neighborhood businesses, they are transformed into “contributing artists.”59 Weaver’s presumptuous strict divide between graffiti and street art (with him as the judge) is certainly not new, as politicians have made this claim ever since street art became financially lucrative. Both categories, though, often bleed into each other. There are certainly participant-­purists in both camps, but from an aesthetic perspective, using graffiti styles in large mural pieces—as Sintex does along the GRCC—makes the divide extremely porous (plate 14). From an economic point of view, however, if the graffiti is sanitized and entices outsiders to enter a neighborhood, it is safe street art. Content often does not matter. Street art celebrating minority figures often does not make graffiti art any less economically viable. Although these areas are certainly in conflict—economic and racial forces structure the neighborhood’s poverty—it is not a traditional war zone, and there is much more leeway for minority cultures to represent as long as the art is presented in a nonthreatening manner. In fact, these images illustrating Black and minority culture are often the draw that brings white tourists with deep pockets into the area. Regardless of the content, street art offers potential investors a rebranded version of the neighborhood. Art-­ wrapped buildings sell for a higher price.

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Or at least that’s the plan. It doesn’t always work out, and the graffiti war that erupted between Derek Weaver and Sintex illustrates how these conflicted relationships are fraught with race- and class-­based tensions. At first, though, the relationship between the two men was beneficial for both. Sintex’s birth name is Brian Glass, and he has been involved in graffiti from a young age. After graduating from Crockett Technical High School (a few blocks from Eastern Market), he went to the Pratt Institute in New York to study art. The terrorist attacks on 9/11, however, interrupted his college career, and Sintex returned to his native Detroit, becoming, as he describes it, “an 18 year vet of the graffiti scene” and “a Detroit ambassador.”60 When local media began covering the GRCC in 2012, there were usually accompanying photos of Weaver and Sintex. They make a surprising pairing: Derek, with his long-­sleeved, collared shirt untucked over his pair of jeans, and Sintex, with his shaved head, camouflage pants, and T-­shirt, seem to be from opposite sides of Eight Mile (which they are). But each offered the other credibility. Weaver had the support of a known Black Detroit-­born graffiti artist with connections to many other artists in the area; Sintex received a six-­thousand-­square-­foot loft in 4731 free of charge for two years. The relationship seemed solid as the GRCC plans continued to materialize. Weaver obtained funding from Home Depot, the Detroit Hardware Company, and Rental Clean USA, while Wayne State University students volunteered to mow and remove garbage from the empty lots. Over one hundred murals were placed on more than fifteen buildings, and a dozen free-­standing sculptures (based on Diego Rivera’s frescoes) were raised on empty lots. The project won the “Keep Michigan Beautiful” prize as Weaver looked for grants and business entities to cover the thousands of dollars in supplies.61 The working relationship between Weaver and Sintex would not last, however, and the separation was messy. On June 18, 2014, Andrew Pisacane, a well-­known mural artist from Baltimore who goes by Gaia, was flown to Detroit by Weaver to paint over one of Sintex’s murals on the north wall of 4641 Grand River, a large building under foreclosure that sold for $6,400. A month prior, Gaia had discussed with Weaver his plans to paint a memorial mural for Vincent Chin, murdered in a savage racial attack by two white men wielding a baseball bat. Gaia sought permission from Chin’s family, and the American Citizens for Justice—an organization founded after the death of Chin—gave approval to use Chin’s likeness. On June 19, Gaia met with “Red,” the owner of the property, as well as Sintex to discuss his vision. After completing the mural in a few days, Gaia left Detroit. A few months later, though, the trouble began. On August 9, Sintex texted Weaver that someone had “buffed” the piece,

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Vincent Chin mural, Detroit. Mural by Gaia. Photo by Patrick Hershberger.

and when Weaver arrived he found black paint haphazardly splashed over the wall. Because the paint was still wet, Weaver removed 90 percent of the damage, immediately planning to hire artists to restore the mural back to its original form. Sintex, though, was adamant that it be removed, and on August 13, after getting permission from Red, he buffed Gaia and placed a new mural on the wall. Chin’s image was again represented but as a smaller figure surrounded by images of Native Americans and other minority figures. After finishing the piece, Sintex made multiple inflammatory Facebook posts, including accusing Gaia of being disrespectful to the community by painting a Chin memorial where he did (Chin had been killed in Highland Park and had no direct connection to the Grand River neighborhood), subsequently entering into numerous beefs with a variety of individuals. On his own Facebook page, Weaver publicly cut ties with Sintex, presenting the GRCC as a conscientious community organization and Sintex as a self-­promoting liar. The “graffiti war” had begun. On a wall near 4731, Sintex painted numerous skeletons in business suits with one who had a name tag “C. Vulture,” obviously accusing Weaver of nefarious cultural appropriation. Sintex also fought against others he believed were “culture vultures,” including graffiti stars Revok and his MSK crew who were in Detroit participating in a corporate-­backed street-­art beautification program. He buffed one of Revok’s murals, replacing it with an image of Tupac holding a gun and the phrase “I got the juice now.” When Revok retaliated by placing his name over the Tupac mural, Sintex painted a mural of Rosa Parks, who is inexplicably holding a sign with his own name. Sintex described the move to paint Rosa Parks as his “chess” move; if Revok buffed the piece, it would start a “race war” (the memorial painting was, after all, on Rosa Parks Boulevard). The mural was not touched; instead the MSK crew painted over Sintex’s popular Art of War mural. Sintex retaliated by buffing Revok and MSK crew’s large Eastern Market mural. As

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Weaver attempted to do damage control, local newspapers began reporting the ins and outs of the “graffiti war”—with most comments to the online articles siding with Gaia and Revok, arguing that Sintex was jealous of their fame.62 No one was killed or physically hurt in this “war,” although the potential was certainly there, as Sintex was arrested in 2013 when he allegedly pulled a gun on individuals who buffed his piece (charges were eventually dropped, and Sintex denies the allegations). The “war,” though, does highlight the potential hazards present in the uneven relationship between artist and benefactor. Painting walls to gentrify a neighborhood seems to be a win-­win for all; but the seeds of anger over racial and economic disparity were planted in this neighborhood long before Weaver began trying to rebrand it. In Weaver’s official statement about the Chin mural defacement, he writes, “Public art is for everyone,” and the graffiti war started by Sintex “shows that the ‘No Fly Zone’ mentality still exists today and hinders the growth and the resurgence of the great city of Detroit.”63 The “No Fly Zone” is a way some Detroit artists stop outside artists from “flying” into the city, performing their show, and then leaving without working with local artists. The unwritten rule—especially in the hip-­ hop community—is that if an out-­of-­state artist performs in Detroit, they must include local artists in their show. On the same day that Gaia was painting the image of Chin on Grand River, the Detroit rapper Trick Trick (Christian Mathis) led a hundred-­person human blockade to stop Rick Ross from performing at a local concert, allegedly threatening Ross’s life if he took the stage.64 While illegal, it was effective; Ross did not perform that night in Detroit. As a white businessman who is not part of the hip-­ hop arts community, Weaver may not have fully understood the No Fly Zone, but Sintex, it seems, was following the lead of Trick Trick and other Detroit artists. For Weaver, the No Fly Zone is hurting Detroit’s revitalization; he is not alone in this view. Many other artists, including Sydney James, who participated in the mural projects of the GRCC and Eastern Market, find excluding outside artists from Detroit to be counterproductive.65 Lines are certainly drawn. When I met Sintex on a hot summer day while he was painting Bob Marley on one of the many medical marijuana shops dotting the streets on Seven Mile, he was adamant that Weaver and his ilk are more interested in raising property values than promoting local artists or art in Detroit. As he stated of the large mural projects covering over the city, “Who’s going to have the money for these things? Pay attention to that.” It’s a valid question when assessing any city mural arts program.66 The details of this “graffiti war” are messy, and the “truth” of what happened is hard to pin down, even after conducting multiple interviews

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Greener Thingz, Seven Mile, Detroit. Mural by Sintex. Photo by John Lennon.

and following the media reports of the “war.” But unlike successful street art revitalizations that hide gentrification’s impact on minority and poor people, this iteration brought issues of race and class to the forefront. A white real estate entrepreneur gave free space in his building to a Black graffiti writer in order to attract investors to the neighborhood. As attention to the neighborhood grew, a white muralist from Baltimore was commissioned and flew to Detroit to paint a memorial to an Asian American victim of white violence in this predominately Black community. When Sintex buffed the mural, he then started a larger “graffiti war” that included taking on a white Los Angeles–­based graffiti “king” and his crew who were in Detroit to participate in a “beautification” street-­art program financed by a number of companies based in Los Angeles and Detroit. The “war” included battling on the streets by painting over MSK’s murals, replacing them with images of iconic Black rappers and civil rights leaders (all seeming to highlight Sintex’s own name). Painting the image of a victim of a hate crime had unintended consequences in the GRCC, uncovering the racial and economic politics of a neighborhood uncomfortably attempting to transition into something “more.” As of 2020, Derek Weaver is the principal at Clear Advantage Asset Management, who, according to his LinkedIn page, turns real estate “problems into opportunities,” while Sintex is still painting on walls throughout Detroit as the city’s “graffiti ambassador.”67 The GRCC has

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more murals, but the revitalization of the neighborhood is hard to quantify. The 4731 space has been sold, and Weaver has stated that he left the neighborhood because city regulations made it “extremely difficult to own property in Detroit.” Ironically, the building was bought by Allied Media Project, a nonprofit opposed to gentrification, which displaced all the tenants.68 The revitalization strategies behind the GRCC are not unique in Detroit—many neighborhoods use graffiti and street art to rebrand—but the public feud uncovers the messy racial politics underwriting many of these plans. In Weaver’s case, his pockets were not as deep as Gilbert’s, and the street art did not lead to Grand River’s radical transformation. Weaver, of course, is an outsider who saw the GRCC as an economic investment, not a place to live. In the next section, I examine an artist who calls attention to a Detroit neighborhood in conflict where he was born and raised. The ensuing racial and economic politics are no less messy.

from humiliation to transformation? the heidelberg project One morning in 1986, Tyree Guyton stepped out on his porch and carefully listened to the sounds of the city calling out to him. What he heard were the anguished cries of his neighborhood. The thirty-­year-­old man who had lived all his life in Detroit decided then and there that through his art he would respond to that call. Thus began the Heidelberg Project. When he was nine years old, Guyton’s grandfather Sam Mackey put a paintbrush in his hand, telling him to “paint the world.” Three years later, his East Detroit neighborhood was burning as the 1967 race uprisings set many parts of the city on fire. Guyton harrowingly recalls: “I was 12 and I thought the whole world was coming to an end. . . . Everywhere I looked buildings were burning. The city never recovered. We’re living in a new millennium and we’re still not recovered.”69 Walking out onto his porch in 1986, surrounded by dilapidated houses, crime, drugs, and prostitution—along with families who had lived in the neighborhood for generations and were struggling to survive—he heard what Neal Shine, former president of the Detroit Free Press, has labeled “psychic echoes.” These are the “echoes of the past in places like old houses, in the walls, the floors, and in the ceiling . . . you could hear them if you listened enough and honestly believed that the place could speak to you.”70 On that morning in 1986, Guyton believed, and in the thirty-­plus years working on the Heidelberg Project, he has not lost his faith. Incorporating murals and sculptures, Guyton transformed houses in his neighborhood into art installations, using the detritus of the city surrounding

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him. Placing a mural of Martin Luther King Jr. on one house, nailing thousands of shoes onto the weathered boards of another, lining hundreds of discarded vacuums in an abandoned plot of land, or building piles of old tires, discarded toys, and unrecognizable items picked from a garbage dump in another, Guyton has significantly changed the neighborhood’s aesthetics. Bright-­colored dots are present on some houses, while rusted, broken-­down machines are on other lawns; the project is big, chaotic, and bold in its implementation. Heidelberg’s name derives from the street from which the art project has expanded, belying the neighborhood’s German working-­class roots. By 1986, though, it was primarily a poverty-­stricken Black neighborhood, with an abundance of abandoned houses and lots. Guyton began repurposing the overgrown plots of land and the dilapidated houses, creating his paintings and structures that are a cross between the graffiti drawings of SAMO/Basquiat, the ready-­made art of Marcel Duchamp and Tracey Emin, and the folk art practices of Clare Graham, Timothy Washington, and Mr. Imagination. Guyton found the objects discarded in the streets, remaking them into art. In AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History, Jerry Herron graphically depicts the art on Heidelberg Street: “His houses literally vomit forth the physical elements of domestic history, furniture, dolls, television sets, signs, toilets, enema bottles, beds, tires, and baby buggies come cascading out doors and windows and through holes in the roof flowing down the outside walls and collecting in great heaps on the lawn, so that the whole looks like some sort of man-­made lava flow. The magma of discarded lives: these visible tokens of a humiliated history.”71 What was inside is now outside; what was private is now public for all to see. For Herron, Guyton’s structures are unmistakable bodies, vomiting up the private relics of the dispossessed. The ready-­made objects are not supposed to be seen outside of the home, and yet they are expelled into the street, partially digested and uncomfortably real in their disclosure. In Julia Kristeva’s sense of the term, which she explores in much detail in Powers of Horror, Guyton’s art renders the abject; when viewing his artwork one is confronted with a breakdown in meaning between what is a subject and what is an object, what is the self and what is the other.72 The house becomes a defiled body; to view it is to examine a corpse. To explore the Heidelberg Project is to discover the abject, an open wound streaming out its pus, where boundaries between self-­other or subject-­object no longer are clear. The abject is “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.”73 Pretty colored circles aside, the Heidelberg Project elicits intense feelings of the abject as the vomited objects of the house-­corpse flow outward.74 Guyton would certainly disagree with using psychosexual theory to

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examine Heidelberg, arguing that his work is about hope and reconciliation, not death. The artist has explained, “I create beauty—my own beauty from what I see, what I understand, but not without first being able to relate to the beauty in myself.”75 Guyton is a spiritual man with a religious zeal about the “life” he creates, coining the term Heidelbergology to define how found objects and murals can be assimilated into an urban community as an art practice.76 There is, though, a flattening of the inherent racial and economic politics of the project when Guyton categorizes his art in this way. Herron understands Heidelberg in distinctly political terms: an artistic response to the sociopolitical daily lives of poor Black victims of systematic racial and class-­based practices that caused their “humiliation.” Herron’s term is important. Guyton’s installations and murals, presented in the streets where people are struggling, underscores the humiliation present in racial poverty. Race-­based neoliberal capitalism economically wounded those living in this neighborhood; Guyton’s work exposes the humiliation involved in the “discarded lives” of those evicted. Duchamp’s urinal was shocking because he placed an object connected to the private space of excretion within the hallowed halls of a museum. The scandal of his ready-­made sculpture is not that it is a urinal but that it is a urinal on display in a museum and labeled as art. The Heidelberg Project, while reminiscent of Duchamp’s art object, is doing something different. Guyton is taking objects of the private sphere and, instead of placing them within a museum, displaying them on his own neighborhood’s streets. The detritus is the neighbors’ “waste”; the broken objects he nails onto his walls or incorporates into his paintings are part of the lives of those who have suffered. The spray paint on the walls of the houses calls attention to the broken shingles of those homes that belong to his evicted neighbors. Guyton’s artwork highlights this humiliation. Weaver, following in the footsteps of Gilbert and others, attempted to use graffiti to gentrify the Grand River neighborhood, knowing that art drives higher real estate prices and alters demographics. The Heidelberg Project, though, does not fit easily into this gentrification narrative, as there has not been a significant change in the McDougall-­Hunt neighborhood since 1986. There is no Starbucks on a corner, no microbrewery in one of the houses, no pop-­up bakery stall selling mini-­doughnuts on one of the lawns. The art was prominently displayed when I visited in 2017, but the neighborhood still had many overgrown plots of land. In the 2010 census of tract 5168 of Wayne County (Heidelberg is part of the approximately fifty-­street tract), out of the 774 residents, 739 were African American or Black. There were 472 housing units available, but 145 of them were unoccupied, not accounting for the number of abandoned

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buildings knocked down by the government over the past decade.77 The neighborhood, I was told, did not look that different from what it did in 1986. Michael Hodges, a former writer for the Detroit News, stated bluntly in 2007, “Indeed, twenty years on, it’s fair to ask whether the Heidelberg Project has improved the neighborhood and helped the community.”78 Add another ten-­plus years into the mix, and the answer is even more ambiguous. Guyton’s work highlights the systematic racism enveloping the lives of those in East Detroit, but does his work also help transform the neighborhood, easing the humiliation of those living there? Importantly, could his work be an antidote to gentrification by enriching the neighborhood for those living within its confines? The answer seems to be a resounding no. Many residents were angered Guyton took it upon himself to make their neighborhood a living art piece. By repurposing the abandoned houses and empty lots, Guyton was forcing his neighbors to be a part of the attraction that brought tourists into to the area. As Erma Dicus, a woman living three houses away from the Guyton household since 1956, asked, “Who gave him permission? . . . Who let him do this?” B. B. Odums, another woman living in the neighborhood, stated, “If we rode up and down the streets in the suburbs, we’d get picked up because we’re Black. Every summer night we’ve got people riding up and down and looking at what we’re doing. It’s an invasion of privacy. They look at us like we’re animals on display.”79 Over two hundred thousand visitors drive through this McDougall-­Hunt neighborhood each year, stopping their cars and walking around the plots of land.80 The Heidelberg Project allows these visitors to experience a living “ruin” much as Hurricane Katrina gave tourists a chance to examine the destruction of the Ninth Ward, even as people were living there and trying to piece together their lives. Journalists have linked the two cities as modern-­day ruins, with Adam Nossiter stating: “New Orleans [post-­ Katrina] will be like Detroit. . . . A moldering core will be surrounded by miles of vacant houses, with wide open neighborhoods roamed by drug dealers and other criminals.”81 The New Orleans disaster tours allowed well-­intentioned tourists to see the ruins for themselves. Similarly, trips to Heidelberg are a safe way to view Detroit’s “moldering core”—or “the zone,” as one author describes it—where the ruins of a once-­proud neighborhood are laid bare.82 These moments of contact are important to Guyton and his defenders—white tourists would never enter his neighborhood without the art to attract them. The Heidelberg Project is a way to connect, and regardless of the tourists’ intentions, the result is still contact, a rubbing together of peoples who normally never meet.83 Derek Weaver argued this

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point about the value of graffiti in the GRCC; when those in the suburbs meet those in the inner city, radical transformations can happen. But as Hodges argues, “With the clear majority of neighbors either indifferent or hostile, what claim can Heidelberg make to community enrichment, a central part of its professed mission?”84 Community enrichment, though, is a central tenet of the Heidelberg Project, and over the years, there have been numerous attempts to raise funds for neighborhood improvement. Over the thirty-­year history, Guyton updated the installations (rebuilding when the city destroyed some of the art), consistently adding new art pieces. The project evolved into a nonprofit corporation led by Jenenne Whitfield, a woman so inspired when she first saw the art that she quit her job, attempting to turn the one-­man project into an artistic cultural village. Over the years, Whitfield struggled to legitimize Heidelberg, arguing for its community usefulness, including educational opportunities. Trying to combat the residents’ negative voices, she has created a public awareness campaign highlighting its artistic and social benefits. Whitfield has been moderately successful, working with Detroit mayors who have supported the project (or at least turned a blind eye), Wayne State University, and various large donors, including the Kresge Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, and the Bloomberg Philanthropies.85 In 2019, Guyton and Whitfield began working with the Detroit Land Bank (a quasi-­governmental organization that has bought up 50 percent of abandoned homes in Detroit) to become a “community partner” in the neighborhood.86 In the third decade of its existence, Heidelberg has continued to evolve. In the surrounding areas of Heidelberg Street, graffitied clocks have appeared on abandoned houses, all pointing to different times, some with no hands at all. In a news release, Guyton asserts, “After 30 amazing years, it’s time to bring a close to this phase of the project. It’s time for change! Haven’t you noticed the clocks?”87 The new vision calls for more art programs, outreach, and renovation of the original houses. Whitfield has been promoted to CEO, while Guyton is completing a multiyear process of dismantling the art from the grounds not owned by the Heidelberg Project, showcasing the pieces in various museums and galleries.88 In May 2019, the New York Times published an article on Guyton, stating that he is dismantling the Heidelberg Project because the neighborhood, while not yet gentrified, “has shifted from an impoverished pocket into a potential opportunity,” claiming that “the artist gained international acclaim making sculptures of the wreckage of his neighborhood. Now he must destroy his work in order to save it.”89 M. H. Miller’s turn of a phrase leaves the it unclear: save what, exactly? The art or the neigh-

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Clock on abandoned house, Detroit. Photo by John Lennon.

borhood? The answer, I find, becomes transparent when analyzing the Heidelberg Project App, which offers self-­guided walking tours. The app, created by Isobar, won the 2018 MediaPost Appy Award in the Mapping/ Location-­Based category and is a simple, easy-­to-­use interactive platform with a clickable map of the artwork.90 For me, this app encapsulates both the potential and the objections associated with the Heidelberg Project for the past thirty years. On the Heidelberg Project website, a news bulletin celebrates this award with a professionally stylized photo that places the iconic “dot house” in the background (plate 15). The dots are inspired by Guyton’s grandfather, Sam Mackey, and his love of jelly beans. As described by the app, “The dots represent the circle of life, the cell, the sun, the moon and how all things in life are connected and repeat.” The 1908 house is where Guyton grew up (and where in 1986 he emerged from to hear the cry of his neighborhood). Nicknamed the “Dotty Wotty House,” colorful circles of all sizes and colors cover the outside of the two-­story house. According to the “Insights” section of the app, “Dotty Wotty represents how we should celebrate and respect all races of people living together.” The two people in the forefront of the photo, however, are not of different races but a young white couple joyously holding hands. The young woman, in a white sweater and an above-­the-­knee green skirt, is laughing

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while the twentysomething man, in a button-­down long-­sleeved shirt and dress jeans, is staring happily at her. The photo looks as if from a J.Crew catalog advertising to a white middle-­class clientele, not a scene in front of a house in the middle of a poor Black neighborhood. There is harmony in the photo, but it is between man and woman, not between couple and environment. The artwork is background, with the happy white couple the focus of the photo. The description of the circles as representing racial harmony is certainly hopeful—a far cry from seeing the Heidelberg Project as the evictee’s “humiliation.” Herron, though, made his comment in the 1990s, and the project has certainly evolved, culminating in this image of a white bourgeois couple frolicking in front of a dotted house. It’s hard not to read this image in the context of B. B. Odums’s comment—“If we rode down the streets of the suburbs we’d get picked up because we’re Black”—while the white couple seemingly has no worries as they walk hand in hand in a neighborhood that does not appear to fit their socioeconomic status. Here, Heidelberg is advertised as a safe cultural outing for white people who enjoy art. In the visual politics at play in the advertisement, there is an emphasis on showing a neighborhood where these outsiders would feel at home. While this might speak to the Heidelberg Project’s stated goal for racial harmony through art, it erases the racial and economic political reality. Dan Gilbert and Derek Weaver are white men intent on revitalizing neighborhoods. Although gentrification is a bloated term that is pliable and overused, these men are using street art to transition neighborhoods to support higher real estate properties. While this strategy is coded as a positive economic renovation, a social and racial transition will consequently occur in these neighborhoods on a comparable scale to the gentrification’s “success.” Tyree Guyton, however, is from the neighborhood where he creates his art. His transformation was one of spirit, and for over thirty years, hundreds of thousands of people have traveled to examine the art Herron has called a humiliation and Guyton has called beautiful. The neighborhood, though, has remained relatively static. But can street art stop gentrification while encouraging neighborhood enrichment? Can it be organized in a way that limits state and local municipalities from “igniting” neighborhoods, presenting instead a neighborhood as one worth protecting around core racial and social histories? In contrast to the other entrepreneurs discussed in this chapter, Kevin Harris, an African American orthodontist living and working in Baton Rouge, has used street art to attempt to save a neighborhood from ­gentrification.

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using street art to control gentrification: the museum of public art On a seasonally humid Sunday afternoon in July 2016, I met Kevin Harris and Daryll on the corner of Eddie Robinson and Myrtle in what has been called the Old South Baton Rouge neighborhood. Sitting on the street, with weeds popping up through the cracks in the concrete in front of the Museum of Public Art, we chatted over the loud music spreading out from cars that were driving slowly over the pot-­marked road. Daryll has lived in this neighborhood his whole life; he pointed toward his mom’s house and then his house before explaining his connection to the museum. A house painter by trade, Daryll recounted the neighborhood’s history, reminiscing about a time when the area could support two train stations. Those days, though, are gone. While speaking, he began pointing out various closed businesses.91 A few years before our conversation, while sitting on his porch, Daryll saw Harris taking pictures of the neighborhood, struck up a conversation, and soon became part of a project that would evolve into a museum almost completely organized, run, and financed by Kevin Harris. The Museum of Public Art is not like many other museums, including its lack of a roof (although it does have a door with a lock on it). The interior has been swept clean, with nothing on the inside of the building except walls. Each wall has an elaborate mural on it by some of the most well-­known graffiti artists throughout the world, including Belin, Pose 2, Chemis, and Odeith. Mohammed Ali, Richard Pryor, along with weird-­shaped aliens and a 3-­D alligator, pop out from the wall. Being roofless also allows the art to spill from the inside of the museum out into the surrounding neighborhood. Intricate graffiti styles, bright colors, and often Afrocentric themes, mark the outsides of numerous buildings around the museum. These buildings include the gorgeous, though derelict, Lincoln Theater, a famous landmark opened in 1956 as a showcase of art and music for Black audiences. The theater closed in 1986 and the graffitied outside walls served as an unofficial memorial to dead gang members and drug dealers. After much convincing by Harris, the owner of the building finally allowed it to be painted, and in 2013, Chemis and Pose 2 celebrated the theater’s history with African and African American images.92 Connecting history with art, Harris proudly recounted to me his influence in the neighborhood. Driving around this neighborhood, which featured immaculate homes with flowers in front yards and others abandoned, their plots filled with

Museum of Public Art, Baton Rouge. Photo by John Lennon .

Woman with light and long skirt mural, Baton Rouge. Photo by John Lennon.

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overgrown weeds, there are strong similarities to the neighborhoods I drove through in Detroit. Harris pointed out over twenty murals he commissioned throughout the neighborhood. While the subjects and styles ranged, he was particularly proud of one painted on the outside of a beauty shop (plate 16). When examining this mural, his graffiti campaign’s central mission crystallized for me. In the graffiti mural, four Black women with various skin tones are painted along the length of the building, forming a powerful Afrocentric image. One of the women looks at the viewer, her hair flowing upward with an otherworldly quality. From her hair grow two other faces of Black women, forming a triumvirate of Black female power. On the left side of this large mural are painted three women, the first sitting on the floor reading a large book, the second sitting behind her combing the first woman’s hair, and a third standing behind the second one braiding that woman’s hair. Generations of Black women are working together as the youngest generation is reading. Not simply didactic, the images tell a story of female Black power that has generational roots with a visualized hope for the future. The image itself is a culmination of negotiating a shared vision between the owner of the beauty shop and the artist. According to Harris, the mural has had an economic impact on the business; the owner stated that there was an increase in local neighborhood women wishing to get their hair done in the building with these images on the outside. Harris understood the need to find the right person for the beauty shop’s mural. An orthodontist by profession, Harris previously owned an art business but eventually sold it because he found that for most of his customers, “anything that does not fit in the plantation system does not work with their cultural sensibilities. . . . Now if you want to paint some Sambos and Mammies, they think that’s just wonderful. That’s part of the sentiment. They like their little darkies serving mint juleps on porches . . . that’s the imagery they like—that they’ll actually buy.”93 But Harris’s vision for the murals in South Baton Rouge does not cater to racist, infantilized white tastes. For the beauty shop, he contacted Rahmaan Statik Barnes, a graffiti writer and muralist from Chicago whose extensive career features predominately Afrocentric images of strong Black figures.94 Choosing an artist who understands how to work with members of the poor Black community is important for Harris; he understands graffiti as a conversation in which the artist cannot dictate what the art should look like but rather create a dialogue that will spill out into the larger neighborhood community. Creating graffiti murals that engage the community is different from making art that will speak to a future community, one that arrives from

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Police, protesters, dead body mural house, Baton Rouge. Photo by John Lennon.

the outside. While most place-­based mural arts programs, such as the ones in Eastern Market, Philadelphia, and São Paulo, state the need to interact with community members, the programs are meant to appeal to the largest number of people, especially if their raison d’être is to create “foot traffic.” When attempting to “revitalize” a neighborhood, officials are often risk-­averse to anything confrontational. Murals can have images of minority figures; in most communities with mural arts programs, an image of Martin Luther King Jr., for example, will not appear to be confrontational. However, if the objective of the art program is to keep the neighborhood from displacing a poor, minority population, the murals do not need to be “inclusive” or to speak to a wide audience with various sensibilities. Kevin Harris funded almost the entirety of this project to insulate the neighborhood from gentrification. The artwork speaks to this intended goal. Harris’s vision for the neighborhood can be best understood when examining the row houses that show, as he explained it, the “progression toward freedom.” A series of “shotgun”-­style row houses—some abandoned, others not—were painted to illustrate the hard-­fought progression of African Americans. The first house represents Africa, the second house represents enslavement on the plantation, the third shows the beginning of the civil rights movement, and the last houses represent the

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end of the civil rights movement. Trained artists beautifully paint some of the houses, and local community members paint others. For example, the house symbolizing enslavement of Africans is an aesthetically challenging realistic 3-­D image of an older woman in a rocking chair with a small child at her feet. Some houses have more simplistic drawings, painted by nonprofessional hands, including one featuring brightly colored African masks. Another house depicts the 1953 Baton Rouge bus boycott that served as the model for the better-­known Montgomery bus boycott.95 This mural acts as a Baton Rouge history lesson, rooted within a larger African history, and it celebrates a dynamic resistive event. What is fascinating about these art-­wrapped houses is that, although some do show more universally accepted images a wide swath of people could relate to (or at least not be offended by), Harris included confrontational images, including H. Rap Brown ( Jamil Abdullah Al-­Amin), a Black civil rights leader convicted of killing a police officer (plate 17). The image, painted by Chemis, is certainly dynamic: on an abandoned house with plywood covering the door, the silhouetted image of the head and upper body of Brown is painted. Coming up from the floorboards in 3-­D is one single hand holding a lit match. The match, with an impossibly long flame, has started a fire, with the light splashing on Brown’s face. The Baton Rouge–­born Brown, who was the fifth chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, wrote the inflammatory political autobiography Die Nigger Die! (1969). He infamously proclaimed “violence is as American as cherry pie,” and, “If America don’t come around, we’re gonna burn it down.” Placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list after avoiding trial for inciting a riot, Brown eventually served five years in Attica prison. While there, he converted to Islam and changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-­Amin; upon leaving prison, he moved to Atlanta and became a community activist. On March 9, 2002, he was convicted of the murder of Fulton County sheriff Ricky Kinchen, who was shot and killed when attempting to serve Brown a warrant (Al-­Amin denies the charges). Most city beautification campaigns would certainly reject the image of an incendiary Black activist and convicted murderer of a police officer. Celebrating H. R. Brown/Jamil Abdullah Al-­Amin’s “burn, baby, burn” motif on a wall in a decimated South Baton Rouge community calls out institutional racism, advocating for the emergence of a new United States from the ashes of the old. The artwork, painted a decade after Brown/ Al-­Amin was convicted of killing Kinchen, is not meant to bridge Black and white relations or to offer easily digestible history lessons to white tourists. It is not trying to show, as President Donald Trump stated after Heather Heyer was killed in South Carolina while protesting a white

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nationalist demonstration, that there are “very fine people” on “both sides.”96 Harris’s graffiti murals are meant to provoke uncomfortable conversations. Speaking with the orthodontist in his office, which Harris adorned with beautiful stained-­glass windows, making it feel more like an art studio than a place to get braces, it is obvious that Harris is fine with confrontation. Our conversation often touched on Baton Rouge’s overt and veiled racism. We spoke shortly after Alton Sterling was killed by Officer Blane Salamoni on July 5, 2016, while he was selling CDs in front of the Triple S Food Mart. For days afterward, protesters demonstrated against racialized police violence enacted upon the bodies of African Americans. A graffiti wave appeared overnight, including murals of Sterling (one placed on the market itself ), antipolice graffiti calling for the death of police officers, and numerous “ACAB” (all cops are bastards) tags. Protesters were in the street, and paint covered the walls. Much of the antipolice graffiti I documented in the city was amateurish, with the letters scrawled on walls by hands that did not have much control over their spray cans. The city was on edge as reports of an unarmed Black man killed by police fit into a national conversation begun in earnest with the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson. Angry, accusatory graffiti was one way in which the conversation erupted. The violence against Sterling was not shocking to Harris (or many of the Black community members I spoke to that day) but revealed the racism of living in Louisiana. To that end, Harris spoke of the lack of funding he was able to receive from state and local sources despite the Museum of Public Art receiving positive attention in newspapers and other local media and having thousands of followers on Facebook. He believes the reason is simple: “Because it was in a Black neighborhood, and anything that appeals to or benefits Black people is not something that white people can embrace.” Harris explained the murals were not all political; many were, in fact, abstract art by some of the world’s most well-­ known muralists. But, because it was in a Black neighborhood, he was unable to find financial support from the white community.97 He looked to other sources of funding, including a Kickstarter campaign and local Black churches, but both were ultimately unsuccessful.98 Harris therefore funded most of the project with his own money, paying for artists to come to Baton Rouge. He and Daryll were responsible for them when they arrived in town, acting as a welcoming committee to Baton Rouge and showing them around the community while also organizing the more practical tasks of providing rides to and from the airport, arraigning hotel rooms, and dealing with issues that arose when artists ran afoul of the law.

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“BRPD Are Killers” graffiti on building, Baton Rouge. Photo by John Lennon.

The main reason Harris is so committed to the project—besides being a huge graffiti fan—is the role of gentrification in this Black community. Unlike Sean Cummings or Dan Gilbert, who use art to enhance gentrification, Harris believes that graffiti is a way to put an end to, or at least limit, gentrification. He certainly hopes for urban renewal, but Harris wants it enjoyed by the actual residents who live there, not those who would come in after the changes have taken place. The South Baton Rouge community sits between Louisiana State University and the downtown area.

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The neighborhood where the murals are located separates the two areas, and as the two sections begin to prosper, land developers are considering Old South Baton Rouge as the next potential site for revitalization. The problem for developers is that they have to get the people living there to move out. For Harris, public art is a way to stop this removal: “If the people, the community, has something to offer, it would be a little bit different. Meaning that you can’t just get rid of all the art that we’ve created, can’t get rid of all the murals. We have something here that you can’t replace with your new buildings. It offered people an opportunity to start to unite under a common cause, which they’d never done before.” The project, he states, has no “commercial or monetary incentive behind it. It wasn’t promoting anything, it wasn’t trying to make the community appealing so that outsiders could move in there.” Harris believes he is creating a space for a voice to emerge from the community when talks begin on “igniting” the neighborhood. As Harris states, “When communities bring art to the table there is less talk about demolition and more talk about preservation.” 99 The hope is that the art will force investors and Baton Rouge to take into account the people living within the community instead of focusing on derelict housing needing to be razed. In other words, there is no profit but maybe something “more.” Is Harris being overly optimistic? Will developers targeting South Baton Rouge consider the people living in the neighborhood as they revitalize, or will they look to move in a new population that can pay higher rents? Is there money to be made in preserving a dilapidated, though historically important, old theater, or is there better money in renovated loft space showcasing a few of the theater seats as kitsch luxury? Harris is far from naïve, and on our travels throughout the neighborhood, he pointed to one building already zoned for new loft space, pointing out how gentrification has begun to seep into the neighborhood. He has also given up fundraising because of the racism he perceives in the city, as well as the time, money, and effort it would take to organize. Importantly, Harris has also not made on-­the-­ground connections to any neighborhood activist community, and in my conversations with him, there is no indication that he has gone through the hard labor of working with community organizers. Instead, he has been a one-­man operation who financed and found the artists himself, making deals with individual business and home owners to paint their walls. There is certainly community involvement when it comes to the artwork, but little coalition building with other types of community organizations. He hopes that art will save the community. Art, though, without a popular organized movement behind it, will not protect a neighborhood from real estate entrepreneurs.

“For More Than Profit” : 205

As Harris pulls back, others have moved in. These groups rely on patronage and government subsidies to “beautify” the city. One specific group becoming a force in Baton Rouge is the Walls Project, featuring mural art throughout the city, including South Baton Rouge. The project originated when Casey Phillips was on a beach in Santa Monica, California, and a feeling of shame overpowered him for abandoning the city of his youth. After running away from Baton Rouge and spending his twenties in New Orleans, Colorado, and eventually Los Angeles, he returned to his hometown and saw a desperate need for “new energy” and leadership to transform his city. Splitting Baton Rouge into three major demographics—the locals who have lived all their lives in Baton Rouge and make up 88 percent of the population, the “boomerangs” who move away for a time before coming back “home,” and the “transplants” who move to the city for a variety of reasons. For Phillips, it is this third group of outsiders he calls “his people” and “his heroes.” They are the ones who “have huge ideas” because they are “starved and thirsty for culture [they] don’t have.” They are not anchored to a passive mind-­set, believing that the city is “just the way it is and always will be.”100 It is these transplants, not those who have been living in the Baton Rouge communities their whole lives, that he believes will reinvent the city. When Phillips returned to Baton Rouge as a self-­proclaimed “entrepreneurial activist,” he volunteered in many arts-­related activities. Forming a small group of ten influential townspeople, and without any foresight or knowledge of public art, the group decided they would paint a mural. It was well received by those inside the community, and by the time they were painting the second mural, they had over a thousand donors. The Walls Project had officially begun. Started in 2012, the Walls Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit created by real estate developers and various community members in Baton Rouge with a professional public relations campaign claiming that, “through creative placemaking, The Walls is educating citizens to create a skilled workforce, rejuvenating public and private structures and streetscapes, improving local business viability and public safety, and bringing diverse people together to celebrate, make change, and be inspired.”101 To do so, the project is “fostering entrepreneurs and cultural industries” that will integrate “arts and entrepreneurial initiatives” that have an impact on “participants far beyond simple self-­expression.” The goals are lofty; each side of the official triangle logo—create, cultivate, and reactivate— is meant to seamlessly work together. Unlike Harris, the Walls Project attempts to work with various community organizations to build their brand by reaching out to numerous constituents. Besides placing murals in the community, the Walls Project also has programs for science, tech-

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nology, engineering, the arts, and math education as well as workforce development, with a goal of getting youth engaged in creating “the future of Baton Rouge.”102 By 2018, over one hundred murals had been painted throughout the city, six hundred students had gone through some form of an educational program, and more than thirty blocks had been “reactivated” (which, among other things, means that garbage has been picked up and houses have been painted). In his analysis of the Walls Project, Noureddine Miladi suggests that this type of project “may serve as an alternative space for marginal views to emerge and brought to the attention of the establishment,” allowing minority voices to have discussions with those in power.103 From Miladi’s point of view, both Kevin Harris’s project and the Walls Project are similar, creating positive forces within the community. But these two projects, while sharing comparable activities—painting murals and graffiti in Baton Rouge—diverge at key points. While Harris could not find backers, and he has insisted that racism was a key component for the lack of interest, the Walls Project, originated by a “boomerang” white man, has found many corporate backers, including, Cox, ExxonMobil, Best Buy, and Capital One. While there are a variety of factors for the differing “success” of the two projects, the nuanced ideology of urban renewal certainly plays a role. Harris believes that his graffiti murals can produce “a seat at the table,” staving off the harshest tentacles of gentrification already wrapping themselves around the neighborhood. While Phillips’s “arts activism” may be pure, the Walls Project is certainly much more ambiguous about its intentions vis-­à-­via gentrification. To whom does the Walls Project answer? The neighbors? The board? Corporate sponsors? When speaking to Helena Williams, a Walls Project spokesperson, she explained that the project itself is a constantly evolving organization attempting to walk the very fine line between urban renewal and gentrification. When I questioned whether the murals themselves could start “reactivating” neighborhoods to the point that current residents would no longer afford to live there, she stated there is a conscious “hope” the project will lead to urban renewal and not “gentrification.” Scanning through the project’s board of directors and seeing names from various architectural and real estate firms, however, there are certainly questions around this commitment. For example, why is the Walls Project, a nonprofit organization, involved in painting a huge blues harmonica on the outside of the Belle of Baton Rouge Casino?104 What this example shows is that, unlike Harris, who is trying to create art for those within the community, the Walls Project has its sights set on those outside. The Museum of Public Art and the Walls Project diverge on the idea of

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what the murals should do within a community. For Harris, the graffiti’s artistic merit is of great importance. Claiming that there were not enough talented graffiti artists in Baton Rouge, Harris brought “the best” writers and artists to the neighborhood, attempting to make this Southern city a known stop for world-­renowned graffiti writers. Harris hopes that when “urban development” progresses in this poor Black neighborhood, the residents will have something that allows them to negotiate. Harris, though, was unable or unwilling (depending on whom you speak to in the community) to get his more radical vision to be supported financially by a larger community. Banging his head against what he considers racist bureaucracy, and others describe as a difficult personality, he ended his project. Phillips, in contrast, who desires to work with different private funding groups and government agencies, has been successful in building a brand around his mural beautification project. He is aware that funding is easily lost, and the artwork, therefore, is neither controversial nor overtly political. During my conversation with Williams, it was unclear how much approval (direct or tacit) the Walls Project receives from the mayor’s office; it is apparent, though, that the organization and mayor’s office work closely together. When clicking through the one hundred murals, almost all are nonconfrontational. Except one. The day after Alton Sterling’s death, Casey Phillips commissioned artist Jo Hines to spray paint an image of Alton Sterling on the side of the Triple S Food Mart (plate 18).105 The walls were already tagged by those who had “signed in” at the gas station to offer their condolences to the Sterling family and to publicly grieve the death of the unarmed Black man killed by police. Written in Sharpie markers, these graffiti notes were expressions of grief and rage. Getting permission only from the owner of the gas station, Phillips did not seek formal approval from the mayor’s office or ask permission from donors—the mural was painted on the gas station as Black Lives Matter protests were being organized throughout Baton Rouge. It was a risky decision when much of the Walls Project’s funding came from the state or philanthropic donations from wealthy (white) donors—a move Williams stated that they did not know how the town would react to (there were, in fact, a few objections). This was the image, though, that made numerous paper and television reports in the aftermath of Sterling’s death. While Harris must answer to no one when placing the image of H. Rap Brown/ Jamil Abdullah Al-­Amin on a building in South Baton Rouge, Phillips certainly does. It was a bold choice for him to organize a memorial to a Black man killed by the police. Harris’s racial politics are clear. His commissioning of Afrocentric imagery and radical Black political leaders’ murals is an attempt to limit

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gentrification’s scope, keeping the neighborhood a Black-­centered one. Unbending in his aesthetic vision and his political ideology, Harris went it mostly alone and, after a successful run, was burned out both mentally and financially. Casey Phillips, a self-­identified “entrepreneurial activist,” also desires change, although he believes that outsiders are the primary agents needed to revitalize the city. Phillips envisions a new Baton Rouge emerging from the shell of the old and his entrepreneurialism has led him to make deals with various stakeholders. There lies the major difference: Harris believes that graffiti art can protect the neighborhood by keeping its culture and residents; Phillips’s reliance on outsiders does not share these same end goals.

• In Detroit, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Miami, Philadelphia, São Paulo, and countless other cities around the world, there is a clear divide between street art and graffiti. In this chapter, the division between mural arts and graffiti is one way to explore the nuances of gentrification as race-­ based capitalism—especially in conflict areas undergoing economic and racial transformation. A “new” New Orleans emerged post-­Katrina; what does a “new” Detroit look like post-­bankruptcy with its similar threads of neoliberalism, gentrification, and racial capitalism? In the latest wave of conflict graffiti, street art has been leading the way.

CONCLUSION : NEW WAVES early impressions of covid- ­1 9 graffiti

I write this brief conclusion in the summer of 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic has erupted in most areas of the globe. My computer is my lifeline to the outside world, and I find myself obsessed with searching out images of empty city streets. As beautiful as these photos tend to be, what draws me to them is the hint of the apocalypse seemingly right outside the frame. They remind me of images from zombie films, where the camera slowly captures the empty cavernous city avenues before stopping in front of a smaller alley filled with hundreds of the feasting undead. For me, these empty city photos of iconic places from around the world point to what is missing, and the danger that may be lurking around the corner. These unpeopled images of city streets remind me of the photos of New Orleans after Katrina but with one major difference: post-­Katrina, parts of New Orleans were in ruins. The convention center’s broken roof, the homes torn from their bases, the destroyed boats awkwardly lying on their sides showed a scarred city whose blunt injuries were visible on its skin. In Robert Polidori’s After the Flood, we see the devastation of New Orleans; as viewers, we are able to gaze into unknown people’s private realms—the waterlogged sofas, the moldy insides of an opened refrigerator, the brown watermark on a bedroom wall. The unpeopled photos allow us to stare more intently because there is no worry of seeing the bloated dead bodies of the men and women who had formerly lived within these homes. The danger is framed in the past. Times Square’s current empty streets, however, suggest that the peril is still very much present but invisible. Examining these photos, we do not have the comfort of staring because the danger has leaked past the photos’ edges. We know those Manhattan streets are empty because to casually walk them would risk being infected and becoming a carrier our-

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selves. To wander along the avenues means eventually peering down one of those smaller alleys. But just as New Orleans streets were not empty after Katrina, neither are Manhattan’s. Minimum-­wage workers mostly ignored in their “Fight for 15” living-­wage campaign prior to the COVID-­19 outbreak are now labeled as essential workers, “heroes”—although they are not, for the most part, getting paid any more.1 Men and women are still stocking supermarket shelves, delivering food to the homebound, and cleaning hospital bathrooms. These low-­wage workers are in mortal danger as they do their jobs. Although the virus does not discriminate (a mantra repeated time and again by wealthy white politicians), those who are most readily in its path are the working class and poor, with Black Americans at a greater risk to die from COVID-­19 than their white counterparts.2 Racial capitalism does not disappear during a pandemic. Michele Lancione and AbdouMaliq Simone argue that “war” rhetoric, spread by politicians to fight the virus, extends austerity regimes into these COVID-­19 spaces of emergency. It is not surprising that Donald Trump’s response to COVID-­19 during his presidency was to blame China, proclaim travel bans, and stop the issuance of visas, an extension of his xenophobic and ethno-­nationalist policies he implemented before the outbreak.3 Since the post-­2008 global recession, governments have manufactured a “permanent crisis,” structuring neoliberal austerity measures into the very fabric of our everyday lives. These key aspects of austerity technologies—work precarity, increased surveillance, “walling” off of travel and stricter policing measures—have been enhanced in COVID­19 emergency spaces.4 The question that remains is, once the vaccine is made readily available for citizens around the world, will these technologies loosen their grip? Lacione and Simone argue that these newly implemented “health” emergency restrictions may be a “gateway to non-­biological domains that are accessed rapidly and efficaciously precisely because of the biological foundation of emergency.”5 Their statement rings true. As I write, politicians from a number of countries are arguing for phone apps allowing users to easily publicize their health records in order to show they have the “right” antibodies.6 As contact tracing becomes prevalent when the disease is mitigated, surveillance will be a key function of the state apparatus to identify and quarantine potential carriers.7 Foreign citizens may be forced to take invasive medical tests to determine if they are “safe” to enter the country. It is self-­evident that these potential policies can easily slide into racist, classist, and xenophobic implementations. Since the recession of the early 2000s, biopowers have become increasingly natural-

Conclu sion : 211

ized in daily lives; how these structures of control will increase in operation in a COVID-­19 world is certainly worrying. Widespread grassroots protest movements will be needed to resist the attacks on public services which will continue to build on austerity measures already in place. How these protest movements organize when congregating in streets makes one susceptible to catching the virus, remains to be seen, although the massive street protests in the US during the summer of 2020 indicates that people will continue to place themselves in danger to protest injustices. Graffiti and street art have been tools of dissent in these earlier antiausterity protests, and it is clear they will continue to be present as we experience the socioeconomic aftershocks created by COVID-­19 political responses. In the middle of a conflict, public space becomes constricted, surveilled with more vigilance and greater violence. Rafael Schacter argues that despite the increased biopowers in our present circumstances, “graffiti is a space where dissent can be articulated and discourse can be pronounced. And even though it’s in many ways more difficult to produce because you can’t be in the public space, the focus on it becomes ever sharper because everything else is so empty around it.”8 In post-­Katrina New Orleans, graffiti became a way to adamantly claim a presence because, in the midst of destruction, spray paint on houses indicated citizens were still there, alive and fighting. A large “Harsh” tag in the middle of a severely underwater city block gives voice to those trying to rebuild their lives. Walking the streets has become a danger in itself during the age of COVID-­19, but like those in post-­Katrina New Orleans, there are plenty of people on the streets painting walls. On March 13, 2020, @Emily_Lykos began a street-­art and graffiti Twitter thread beginning with Nello Petrucci’s street art from Naples, Italy, that used the long-­running gag-­opening credits to The Simpsons to emphatically declare what to do during the pandemic.9 Throughout that same day @Emily_Lykos continued posting COVID­19 related street art from Tehran, Iran; Raleigh, North Carolina; Taipei, Taiwan; Málaga, Spain; Shanghai, China; and Valencia, Spain—­including aesthetically challenging spray-­painted images of doctors in full protective gear to simple large letters on an overpass stating “Wash Your Hands.” These March 13 postings initiated a long-­running daily thread in which the curator continuously uploads numerous COVID-­19 graffiti and street art images from around the world. Their Twitter feed is one of many on social media, including Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr, that has captured the street-­art and graffiti scene emerging during the pandemic. My early impression of COVID-­19 street art is that it is often visually

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The Simpsons, underpass, Naples, Italy. Credit: Nello Petrucci.

arresting, although somewhat benign. Images of the coronavirus, toilet paper, and masks are common features of what amounts to public service announcements, all the while offering the public reassurance. Rendering the “invisible” virus on walls as silly, cratered blobs with small hands and feet is comforting, marking the virus as beatable. Toilet paper images allude to the real danger of hoarding supplies, but the bathroom humor is comic relief. Murals of hospital workers frame them in universally positive terms, while the numerous images of kissing masked couples have already become a tired street art cliché depicting stylish, young, white heterosexual couplings. News organizations like The Guardian, Financial Times, CBC, and CNBC, to name a few, have all run stories on these types of “inspiring” COVID-­19 graffiti featuring beautiful, technically difficult, although often vapid, graffiti and street art. But as this current wave of street art and graffiti appears on the world’s walls, the most interesting graffiti I have discovered are those with lineage in the early waves of the antiausterity movements. “Make the Rich Pay for Covid 19” (plate 19) has been found in the streets of London, England; Turin, Italy; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Delhi, India—among numerous other cities and towns across the world. This simple declara-

Conclu sion : 213

tive sentence is a threat. While “pay” certainly refers to the need for restructuring austerity economies, violence lingers in what other costs the wealthy must remunerate. This particular graffiti has been reproduced many times, although there are many riffs on this theme on walls, bridges and streets: in rural Australia, “Fight for Higher Wages”; in Montreal, “Covid is Everywhere Justice is Nowhere”; in New Orleans “Capitalism is the virus”; in Atlanta, “Rent Strike.” All these images can be summed up by poignant graffiti found on a subway platform in Hong Kong during the citywide protests there; when translated into English, it states: “There can be no return to normal, because normal was the problem in the first place.” Other graffiti point to more local issues: in Brooklyn, “Rikers is a Death Camp,” refers to the large numbers of trapped prisoners succumbing to COVID-­19.10 In Edinburgh, “Hang Boris Johnson” and “Hang Richard Branson” graffiti are straightforward and seen as the work of the Young Communist League, Britain’s Communist Party’s youth wing. Denying they were responsible for the vandalism, a spokesperson for the league stated: “Political graffiti is a globally recognized democratic tradition and an important part of youth culture in Britain. Although we cannot comment on its origin, the graffiti which has appeared in Edinburgh and other cities across Britain clearly reflects the widely felt anger at the criminal response of this Tory government to the COVID-­19 pandemic.”11 During the pandemic, the walls speak with local and global accents. Arguing for the execution of the UK prime minister and Virgin Atlantic’s billionaire owner places the blame on the government and wealthy for the COVID-­19 response. Not all graffiti and street art is, of course, as explicit. But unlike many of the street-­art public service announcements that appeared during the first few months of the pandemic, political graffiti often does not rally support around nurses, or silly virus renderings, or funny images of Gollum from Lord of The Rings holding a roll of toilet paper. Instead they explicitly point to austerity measures that have destroyed public safety nets for the poor and working class. They reveal the conflict hidden within the pandemic health “crisis.” As this book has argued, graffiti is a tool of dissent that spotlights the forces of racialized capitalism endemic to a conflict, allowing marginalized voices to exert themselves into the larger political conversation. For example, Julia Tulke, drawing from her long-­running ethnographic graffiti archive and her embedded knowledge of Athens, describes that city’s COVID-­19 graffiti as offering a “deep skepticism about the expansion of government authority in the coronavirus crisis, while also drawing attention to the uneven distribution of vulnerability in the present moment.”12 Tulke’s project is an important one: documenting austerity responses in Athens

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through graffiti, she is able spot these threads—heavily influenced and intertwined with the antifascist and pro-­refugee social movements— present in the coronavirus street responses. The present political graffiti has emerged from a strong antiausterity protest movement already present in Athens. “Rent Strike” graffiti found on walls in March 2020 takes on new meaning when linked with anti-­ Airbnb graffiti present in the streets in 2019. Just as the graffiti response in Beirut’s 2019 “you stink” protests were influenced by earlier demonstrations in Tahrir Square, the graffiti responses to the coronavirus learn from previous waves. “Make the Rich Pay for Covid-­19” is not graffiti that emerges in a vacuum. This graffiti has a connecting history to the larger antiausterity political movements that reject ongoing “states of emergency” that have had direct impacts on the marginalized. Archival work by scholars like Tulke provide the important linkage to various social movements that have gained traction within the community, offering pointed responses to government austerity measure in COVID-­19 spaces of emergency. Similar angry responses found in COVID-­19 graffiti are present in the Black Lives Matter–­inspired graffiti covering walls across the United States after the death of George Floyd. On May 25, 2020, Derek Chauvin, a white nineteen-­year veteran of the Minneapolis Police Department, kneeled on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and fifteen seconds. After pleading at least twenty times that he could not breathe and begging for his life, Floyd lost consciousness and died.13 His killing—and the death of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Botham Jean, among numerous other unarmed Black men and women killed by police in recent years—led to widespread civil unrest across the country. In the midst of the US government’s bungled response to the pandemic that cost thousands of lives, Trump responded directly to the Floyd protests by posing for a photo op holding a Bible in front of St. John’s Church after peaceful protesters were tear gassed.14 The president’s agenda to stoke racial animus and promote a white nationalist agenda as he headed into his second election cycle was crystal clear. In my introduction, I explored the killing of one unarmed Black man at the hands of the police. In this conclusion, I end with another Black man murdered by a white officer. Systematic racism and horrific acts of violence have not diminished in the time between the deaths of Michael Brown and George Floyd. Racial capitalism is still a veil that shrouds the apparatuses of state oppression and violence. The struggle to respond to this injustice, though, has also not diminished. Waves of protests have shut down city centers as men, women and children have marched through tear gassed streets with arms raised, embodying a racial, social,

Conclu sion : 215

Graffiti on Surrogate’s Court of New York County, Manhattan. Photo by All Night Images.

and economic justice movement demanding a dismantling of state technologies of control. “Hands up, Don’t shoot!” is a plea for police to not shoot unarmed Black citizens. “Defund the Police” is a full-­throated declaration of intent to take away those guns in the first place. Throughout these protests, graffiti has been a key tool used to signify a resistance to white supremacy. When naming specific victims of police violence on the walls of a courthouse or scrawling “Black Lives Matter” on a statue of a confederate general, graffiti reinscribes Blackness into the physical environment, forcing a reckoning of the racial, social, and economic injustice that is part of the United States’ present and its history. Throughout this study I have demonstrated that these two materialities—bodies in streets and spray paint on walls—engage in dialogue with each other, creating a cacophonous voice in resistance to the spaces of emergency that attempt to lock down dissent. As I have argued, this voice is not singular in accent or in vocabulary, but its combined influence in streets force a national reckoning. When protesters and graffiti writers took to the streets to demand that Black Lives Matter in the spring and summer of 2020, cities across the country were paralyzed. As millions were thrown out of work from incompetent governmental responses to the effects of COVID-­19, police and politicians were found on their heels, trying to react to a mobilized,

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Man with paint roller, Washington, DC. Photo by Ted Eytan.

angry, and large protest movement. As a direct result of the violence in the streets, seemingly progressive changes began to materialize. Monuments to slaveholders and Civil War veterans were taken down in the middle of the night in towns and cities across the country.15 Police officers began to march with some protesters, arguing that they, too, were angry at their racist colleagues.16 Numerous national politicians publicly and clearly stated, “Black Lives Matter.” Four days after Trump stood holding the Bible outside of St. John’s Church as citizens lay choking on tear gas a few blocks away, Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, DC, ordered city workers to paint in large, yellow street-­wide letters “Black Lives Matter” on Sixteenth Street, which runs straight southward to the White House. That same day, the mayor also declared that the historical Lafayette Square, which sits in front of the White House and contains the large monument to Andrew Jackson, be officially renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza.17 As Trump repeatedly tweeted about “law and order” at all hours of the night into the void, the mayor of DC was visually responding to the president with a large painted message that could be seen from space.18 Photos of the mural went viral, celebrated by many as a progressive message of solidarity with protesters. Others, however, rejected it as merely symbolic posturing. While the legal Black Lives Matter mural in DC (and soon present in city streets throughout the country) indicates a shift in the national conversation around racial injustice, the mural is also a co-­opting of the protesters’ radical message in favor of a local gov-

Conclu sion : 217

ernment’s pacifying gesture. Immediately, organizers from Black Lives Matter DC rejected the mural and its performative politics, vociferously arguing against “settling for art but not housing, street signs but not investments in the actual things that keep communities safe.” Calling out Bowser’s proposed $45 million budget increase for the Metropolitan Police Department, the group stated that the mural was a “distraction” from the people’s demands.19 As Nubras Samayeen, Adrian Wong, and Cameron McCarthy stated, “While symbolically provocative as a sound-­ bite for US mass media, which always works to titillate while clawing the popular narrative back to a comfortable status quo, the city’s mayor-­ commissioned-­actions were in lieu of real change.”20 Others agreed. On the large yellow Black Lives Matter street mural, protesters changed the stars of the DC flag into an equals sign and added lettering so that the whole message now reads “Black Lives Matter = Defund the Police” (plate 20).21 It’s a brilliant argumentative response to the government’s performative politics of change by specifically indicating how to implement that change. Through painted words, the mural symbolically offered a fig leaf to the protesters. They responded by showing that the whole tree needed to be cut down. The city attempted to pacify protesters with symbolic graffiti. They answered with a specific action item. To make sure their message was heard correctly, another person wrote within the mural, “Fuck the ‘Mural’ Change the System.” Sanctioned Black Lives Matter murals remind me of the beautiful images of COVID-­19 graffiti that celebrate nurses. Both state important messages, but the figurative testaments do not indicate the need for systematic change that respects the lives of Black people or health care workers.22 The illegal DC additions to the mural by protesters restore marginalized voices. This interplay between legal murals and illegal responses indicate how conflict graffiti are in a constant state of erasure and renewal. Each wave of graffiti eventually crashes, and the swells that form cover the protesters original desires, often diluting and changing them. But protest movements also change and adapt, creating new apertures of resistance that hegemonically push the state into uncomfortable positions. How, though, will graffiti and street art affect these emergency spaces? As stated in the introduction, graffiti are messy politics. In the racialized and classed spaces of emergency, graffiti and street art contextualizes the responses’ evolving, and often disparate, nature. Analyzing these ephemeral artifacts allow us insight into how these protest movements react. Graffiti helps us contextualize the roots of the responses. That is why Tulke’s archival research gives us important insight into the present

218 : Conclu sion

moment in Athens or why Faird Samir Benavides-­Vanegas’s work on contemporary Columbian political graffiti helps shed light on the evolving conflict in that nation. It’s why Jeffrey Sluka’s groundbreaking Northern Ireland scholarship on the murals of the Troubles or Lyman Chaffey’s examination of protest graffiti in Spain, Argentina, and Brazil or Pablo Butcher and Carl Middelanis’s analysis of Haitian antigovernmental graffiti or Jessica Pabón-­Colón’s work on all-­female Brazilian graffiti-­writing crews give us critical insight into the political motivation of marginalized citizens from around the globe. All these scholarly interventions help us understand the complex revolutionary desires of people in a particular time at a specific historical moment. But linking these responses from around the world, and seeing how the images are distributed and remixed, helps explain how the routes of graffiti are tools that transnationally affect these spaces of emergency. There is certainly a willing audience to read graffiti and street art— perhaps more than ever as twenty-­first-­century technology has coincided with “stay-­at-­home” orders from COVID-­19. The (relatively) easy access to the digital public sphere compliments the natural environment in a time when accessing the streets are more difficult. Graffiti and street-­art articles and websites could, as Schacter states, “engage the people that otherwise wouldn’t be engaged by this kind of practice. There’s a real possibility of creating new audiences.”23 Schacter is not referring only to the bored, mindlessly scrolling through street art on the web. He is imagining how this technology can be a tool in creating new spaces of solidarity. Never an end to itself, graffiti intermixes past and present protest waves. Schacter, Tulke, and many other emerging scholars of graffiti and street art point to sprayed images as important visual politics that allow those who have been made invisible to be seen and heard. Even more important, these scholars explore how protest graffiti and street art links with communities of dissent. While graffiti studies have been on the margins of humanities’ fields for many years, peace and conflict scholars have only recently begun to see graffiti as a way to understand the needs and desires of the subjects they are attempting to aid. This field has long been criticized for instituting top-­down analysis that lack particular knowledges of the societies that these scholars and policy makers are studying.24 Presently, there is a move by some scholars to examine graffiti as a particular way to understand these societies more intimately.25 By considering the writing on the wall, they acknowledge the issues that are driving the conflict as well as what needs are not being met as the society attempts to rebuild. By studying the waves of conflict graffiti as they interact within a particular locale,

Conclu sion : 219

international actors and agencies can connect with local communities and have a better insight into their particular desires. Conflict Graffiti has highlighted some of the many insights derived from reading these sprayed marks. By studying the walls of Tahrir Square in 2011, for example, graffiti allows us to better understand the messy politics of a massive social movement to remove a president—and how the desires of the protesters are not uniform and often contradictory. The dialogue between protesters in the streets and graffiti on the walls give us a clearer picture of the range of desires that bring people out into the public sphere. By exploring the “Banksy effect” on the Separation Wall, we can better understand the blind spots and the numerous (unintended) ramifications of “graffiti tourists” engaging in international conflicts, including erasing the people and land the activists are supposedly there to spotlight. Comparing Banksy to other international graffiti and street artists who have also made border wall interventions, we can better understand the limitations of graffiti and street art in conflicts. And by highlighting the numerous waves of graffiti experienced in the aftermath of a natural disaster—like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina—we can not only begin to understand how individuals resist exploitative framing of their lives that fit racialized and class-­based ideologies; we can also gain insight how this resistance is channeled into larger social movements. But what my book also argues—and this is particularly important for peace and conflict studies scholars and the policy makers who use their evidence to implement life-­or-­death decisions—is that graffiti need to be contextualized as a social and economically place-­based phenomenon of a particular area. It may be influenced by transnational actors and dispersed and remixed through social media, but graffiti are part of the architecture of a particular conflict. My chapters on New Orleans after Katrina and Detroit post-­bankruptcy detail what happens when graffiti practices of resistance are co-­opted by state and corporate interests that look to racialized economic bottom lines instead of community-­based solutions. Art is a weapon, but like all weapons, it can cause self-­inflicted wounds. Capitalism needs emerging markets to grow, and graffiti and street art lure financiers into new areas of investment. Graffiti was once a bane of landlords’ existence; now they seek out graffiti writers and street artists to balloon property values that help remove poor and working-­ class people from their homes. If we are to take graffiti seriously as a field of study and as a potential conduit for resistance and revolutionary change, then we cannot shy away from examining graffiti in all its complexity. Instead, we need to embrace the messiness of its politics. We must question what we see and

220 : Conclu sion

then seek out the answers where they lead us. For example, sanctioned murals that promote tourism in a neighborhood tell one story, but it is the interplay of graffitied responses by activists to those murals that hold real insight into the nature of generational impoverishment, histories of violence, and the commercialization and commodification of lives in dire poverty. We need to walk the streets, conduct interviews with activists, graffiti writers, politicians, real estate entrepreneurs, and a plethora of other actors to understand the conflict’s impact on a community. We are past the stage of spotting graffiti on walls and social media, and publishing on graffiti in black-­and-­white terms as representing chaos or resistance or renewal. A society in conflict contains all three of these aspects; the graffiti on the walls do as well. If we want our conclusions to be productive in larger political and social conversations and policy decisions, then scholars and activists must continue to reach across national lines and work with one another to understand graffiti and its impact. Building networks amongst international scholars and activists working together on projects that explore the complexity of graffiti from its many viewpoints will continue to bring this field into exciting and productive new directions. In the first few months of the pandemic, besides looking at photos of Manhattan’s empty streets, I also find myself being drawn to images of COVID-­19 train graffiti. As mentioned in the prologue, train graffiti is what brought me into the graffiti subculture. While growing up, seeing trains covered in tags and drawings made me realize that voices disallowed in polite conversation always find ways to force their way in. As the years have passed and trains have become cleaner and more sterile, those voices have also become quieter, pushed further and further away into the margins. I have lived outside of New York City for a number of years, and when I go back to visit, it is obvious that the city has changed. My old Brooklyn neighborhood has gentrified to a point that I don’t recognize it any more. Lutz Henke has stated that street art has helped create “zombie” cities, and he rejects those spaces filled with art that pushes out poor and working-­class peoples.26 I do as well. But watching videos of masked graffiti writers in coordinated attacks on trains that circulate through the veins of cities from around the world, I see a rejection of these zombie spaces. The city is alive and fighting back. One day, I’ll return to my birth city and look down those smaller alleys. COVID-­19 spaces of emergency will continue to be controlled through austerity measures, surveillance, and biopower. Resistance graffiti, a tool for progressive social movements, will be fighting back.

Coronavirus mural on train, Milan, Italy. Photo by Graffiti Milano.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every book is a collective endeavor, and Conflict Graffiti is no exception. When I first had an inkling to begin this project, I knew I would need to rely on the generosity of strangers. I am grateful and humbled that so many met me to share their stories and walk me around their cities pointing out their graffiti-­covered walls. My first thank-­you, therefore, is to all the graffiti writers, artists, activists, and others who I met on my many travels. No one would allow me to buy them coffee, but they were willing to spend long hours speaking to me about graffiti. AZ, Alaa Awad, Ammar Abo Bakr, Billy, Maria Bro­ dine, Sean Cummings, Craig Dershowitz, Khadiga El-­Ghawas, eL Seed, An­toun Fat­tal, Skylar Fein, Matea Fish, Chris Freitag, Gaia, Gan­zeer, David Grant, Mia Gröndahl, Basma Hamdy, Yazan Halwani, Kevin Harris, Adam Heffez, Scott Hocking, Don Karl, Keizer, Amira Khader, Hany Khaled, Mohmmd Kha­led, Miki Kratsman, Douglas MacCash, Ruth Malul-­Zadka, Danielle Mas­trion, Miss 17, Soraya Morayef, The Mozza, Ahmed Naguib, Amr Nazeer, Brandan Odums, Sad Panda, Amar Shabby, Mira Shihadeh, Sintex, Pete Squeak, Murad Subay, Renen Raz (RIP), Aya Tarek, members of Top Mob, Helena Williams, Yaman. Many others do not wish to be named but every single one helped me think through my ideas, challenging my preconceived notions and pushing me to tell a more complete story. The book’s faults are my own, but its successes are a testament to all of you. To be able to conduct interviews, I needed money to travel, and I was able to piece together a variety of grants to do so. I very much appreciate all the professors sitting on those committees who saw promise in my project and awarded me the opportunity. I received grants from a variety

224 : Acknowledgments

of funding opportunities at the University of South Florida—World Faculty Travel, Mobility Grant Award, New Researchers Grant, Humanities Summer Grant, Faculty Senate’s Publication Council—as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend Grant and Tulane University’s Global South Research Grant. I would like to thank my editor at the University of Chicago Press, Alan G. Thomas, along with Priya S. Nelson, Tristan Bates, Katherine Faydash, Meredith Nini, Michael Koplow, and all others who were involved in helping me publish this book. I do, though, want to especially thank Doug Mitchell. He was my first contact with the press and someone who was so encouraging to me before his death. His joyful wonder and love for graffiti, I hope, can be found in this book. When a project takes years to research and then more years to write, there’s a lot of people who get to see pieces, offering encouraging critical responses. There’s no way to list you all here. So here’s the deal: if you are reading through this book and think, “I remember talking to John about graffiti,” next time we meet, I’m buying. But a few specific tips of the cap to Neal Fisher, Stephanie Lance, and Elizabeth Ricketts, three graduate students who worked as my assistants and went through multiple drafts, Cat Modlin-­Jackson who translated much of the Arabic in the book, and Lee Davidson for her wonderful copyediting. I also raise a glass to Chris Robe, a friend since graduate school who has listened to many of my ideas about graffiti while lost on our hikes across Florida. A special shoutout to the librarians at USF who somehow were able to find all the texts I needed; they are unsung heroes. Likewise, all the amateur photographers in this book who I tracked down after seeing their photos online—thank you for your generosity in allowing me to include them in this book. I also owe a heartfelt thanks to my external readers, but most especially to Susan A. Phillips, whose outstanding and thorough review of a draft helped unlock its potential. Reviewing manuscripts is a thankless job but Susan went above and beyond anything I could have hoped for—this book is better because of her. My parents, Helen and John Lennon, and my sisters, Kathleen and Mary Ellen, have always been a source of support and I can’t thank them enough. A particular thank-­you to my dad, who hates graffiti and who I’m pretty sure will think this book is a bunch of left-­wing propaganda. No one, though, has ever had more faith in me or shown me more unwavering encouragement. I love you, Dad. Most important, I want to thank my family. To my daughters Ellie and Abby, you both give me so much encouragement for a future just world. You are two of the best people I know and I so appreciate all the laughs

Ac knowle dgments : 225

you give me every day (and sorry I’ve been cranky—writing is hard). My dog, Finn, who has slept noisily by at feet while I was writing this book, and who only cares for long hikes and soft pets—I owe you a treat. And finally to my wife, Liz, who I have known for half my life and has been my steadfast partner for all those years: I dedicate this book to you.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Translation by Cat Modlin-­Jackson. 2. Laura Durkay, “Homeland Is the Most Bigoted Show on Television,” Washington Post, October 2, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything /wp/2014/10/02/homeland-­is-­the-­most-­bigoted-­show-­on-­television/. 3. Heba Y. Amin, “ ‘Arab Street Artists’ Bomb Homeland: Why We Hacked an Award-­Winning Series,” Heba Y. Amin, October 2015, https://www.hebaamin .com/arabian-­street-­artists-­bomb-­homeland-­why-­we-­hacked-­an-­award-­winning -­series/. 4. Elahe Izadi, “Artists Got ‘Homeland Is Racist’ Arabic Graffiti into the Latest Episode of  Homeland,” Washington Post, October 15, 2015, https://www.washington post.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/10/14/artists- ­got-­homeland-­is-­racist-­arab ic-­graffiti-­into-­the-­latest-­episode-­of-­homeland/. 5. In 2012, Fadi Abboud, Lebanon’s tourism minister, threatened to sue over the depiction of Beirut in the show. For example, an episode—which was filmed in Israel—depicted Beirut’s cosmopolitan Hamra Street, with its outdoor cafés and luxury shops, as a hotbed of militia activity. These depictions show either a complete lack of knowledge of modern-­day Beirut or a willful indifference. See Dan Bilefsky and Mona Boshnaq, “Street Artists Infiltrate ‘Homeland’ with Subversive Graffiti,” New York Times, October 15, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16 /world/europe/homeland-­arabic-­graffiti.html. 6. Much graffiti scholarship has explored how graffiti is considered a symbolic loss of control in the city. For a history, see Tim Cresswell, “The Crucial ‘Where’ of Graffiti: A Geographical Analysis of Reactions to Graffiti in New York,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10, no. 3 ( June 1992): 329–44; Ron Kramer, The Rise of Legal Graffiti Writing in New York and Beyond (New York: Palgrave, 2017). 7. Susan A. Phillips, Wallbangin’: Graffiti and Gangs in LA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Stefano Bloch, Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA’s Graffiti Subculture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 115. 8. This was the point Arab-­German filmmaker Lexi Alexander angrily pointed

228 : Notes to Pages 6 – 8

out on her Twitter feed. See Jude Dry, “German Artist Sells the ‘Homeland’ On-­ Set Graffiti That Declared Show Racist without the Original Artist’s Approval,” IndieWire, October 31, 2018, https://www.indiewire.com/2018/10/homeland-­graf fiti-­artist-­plagiarized-­german-­art-­fair-­1202016796/. 9. There has been quite a bit of scholarly research on graffiti and street art categorizations. See Joe Austin, Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Jeff Ferrell, Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993); Ron Kramer, “Painting with Permission: Legal Graffiti in New York City,” Ethnography 11, no. 2 (2010): 235–53; Susan Philips, Wallbangin’: Graffiti and Gangs in L.A. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1999); Susan Phillips, The City Beneath: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019); Stephen Powers, The Art of Getting Over: Graffiti at the Millennium (New York: St. Martins, 1999); Patrick Rabiega and Mariekie Burger, “Commercial Graffiti: Self-­Expression, the Allure of Danger, or Graffiti Made ‘Pretty’?” Communicato 43, no. 1 (2017): 37–35; Jeffrey Ian Ross, ed., Routledge Handbook on Graffiti and Street Art (New York: Routledge, 2016); Jeffrey Ian Ross, Peter Bengtsen, John Lennon, Susan Phillips, and Jaqueline Wilson, “In Search of Academic Legitimacy: The Current State of Scholarship on Graffiti and Street Art,” Social Science Journal 54, no. 4 (2017): 411–19; Raphael Schacter, “The Ugly Truth: Street Art, Graffiti and the Creative City,” Art and the Public Sphere 3, no. 2 (2014): 161–76; Raphael Schacter, “From Dissident to Decorative: Why Street Art Sold Out and Gentrified Our Cities,” Conversation, November 9, 2015, https://theconversa tion.com/from- ­dissident-­to- ­decorative-­why-­street-­art-­sold- ­out-­and- ­gentrified -­our-­cities-­46030; Anna Wacławek, Graffiti and Street Art (London: Thames & Hudson 2011); Maia Wells, “Graffiti, Street Art, and the Evolution of the Art Market,” in Routledge Handbook on Graffiti and Street Art, ed. Jeffrey Ian Ross (New York: Routledge, 2016), 464–74; Nancy Macdonald, The Graffiti Subculture: Youth, Masculinity, and Identity in London and New York (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Kara-­Jane Lombard, “From Subways to Product Labels: The Commercial Incorporation of Hip Hop Graffiti,” Visual Communication Quarterly 20, no. 2 (2013): 91–103. 10. See David Barish and Charles Webel, Peace and Conflict Studies (New York: Sage Publications, 2017), for an introduction to the field. 11. Philippe Bourgois, “The Power of Violence in War and Peace: Post-­Cold War Lessons from El Salvador,” Ethnography 2, no. 1 (2001): 7. 12. Nancy Scheper-­Hughes, “Small Wars and Invisible Genocides,” Social Science & Medicine 43, no. 5 (1996): 889–900. 13. Nancy Scheper-­Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, introduction to Violence in War and Peace, ed. Nancy Scheper-­Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 3–4. 14. George Sorel, Reflection on Violence (London: Collier, 1906), 60. 15. Wesley Lowery, “Dorian Johnson, Witness to the Ferguson Shooting, Sticks by His Story,” Washington Post, August 9, 2019, http://www.washingtonpost.com /national/dorian-­johnson-­witness-­to-­the-­ferguson-­shooting-­sticks-­by-­his-­story /2019/08/08/79ff3760-­b77e-­11e9-­a091-­6a96e67d9cce_story.html.

Notes to Pages 8 – 15  : 229

16. Ellen Wulfhorst, Daniel Wallis, and Edward McAllister, “More Than 400 Arrested as Ferguson Protests Spread to Other U.S. Cities,” Reuters, November 25, 2014, https://www.reuters.com/ article/us-­usa-­missouri-­shooting/more-­than-­400 -­arrested-­as-­ferguson-­protests-­spread-­to-­other-­u-­s-­cities-­idUSKCN0J80PR20141126. 17. Susan Miller, “Ferguson Protester Featured in Iconic Photo Dies,” USA To‑ day, May 6, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/05/06/fergu son-­protester-­featured-­iconic-­photo-­dies/101365960/. 18. Greg Sharkey, “Ferguson Missouri: Bloody Sunday Families Show Solidarity with the Victim,” Derry Journal, December 1, 2014, https://www.derryjournal.com /news/ferguson-­missouri-­bloody-­sunday-­families-­show-­solidarity-­with-­victim-­1 -­6448747. 19. To this point that the graffiti “history lesson” connected with the history taking place in Ferguson, the burned-­down QuikTrip was graffitied “QT People’s Park (Liberated 8-­10-­14),” and it was where many of the protest marches began. For Heidi Aronson Kolk and Michael Allen, the graffiti and the destroyed gas station were an essential part of the political life of the protest and need to be preserved. See Heidi Aronson Kolk and Michael Allen, “Can We Preserve the Fergu‑ son Quick Trip?” NextSTL, September 2, 2014, https://nextstl.com/2014/09/can­preserve-­ferguson-­quiktrip/. 20. Stuart Jeffries, “Angela Davis: ‘There Is an Unbroken Line of Police Violence in the US That Takes Us All the Way Back to the Days of Slavery,’ ” The Guardian, December 14, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/global/2014/dec/14/angela -­davis-­there-­is-­an-­unbroken-­line-­of-­police-­violence-­in-­the-­us-­that-­takes-­us-­all-­the -­way-­back-­to-­the-­days-­of-­slavery. 21. Joe Coscarelli, “Behind the Best Pictures from Ferguson, with Getty Photographer Scott Olson,” New York Magazine, August 20, 2014, http://nymag.com/intel ligencer/2014/08/behind-­the-­best-­pictures-­from-­ferguson.html. 22. Rich Goldstein, “A Brief History of the Phrase ‘F*ck the Police,’ ” Daily Beast, April 14, 2017, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/23/a-­brief-­history -­of-­the-­phrase-­f-­ck-­the-­police.html. I return to Marvin X’s poem in chapter 5, when discussing an antigentrification mural of H. Rap Brown ( Jamil Abdullah Al-­Amin) in Baton Rouge. 23. John Leland, “Kicking the Ballistics,” Spin Magazine, September 1989, 12. 24. Erik Neilson, “‘It Could Have Been Me’: The 1983 Death of a NYC Graffiti Artist,” Code Switch (NPR blog), September 16, 2013, http://www.npr.org/sections /codeswitch/2013/09/16/221821224/it- ­could-­have-­been-­me-­the-­1983- ­death- ­of-­a -­nyc-­graffiti-­artist. 25. Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (New York: Beacon Press, 1997), 47. 26. Andrew B. Whitford, and Jeff Yates, Presidential Rhetoric and the Public Agenda: Constructing the War on Drugs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 34–73. 27. Deborah Gambill and Ronald Montgomery, Let’s Heal STL: Ferguson Messages in Poetry and Paint (New York: IGC Publishing, 2015), 3. 28. To compare Gambill’s and Montgomery’s collection of selected images to

230 : Notes to Pages 16 – 2 0

another archival project that deals with civil unrest after the George Floyd murder in a very different way, see Georgia Fort, “Minneapolis Protest Art Collection Becomes Largest of Its Kind,” Unicorn Riot, October 28, 2020, https://unicornriot .ninja/2020/minneapolis-­protest-­art-­collection-­becomes-­largest-­of-­its-­kind/. 29. Phil Berwick is a white, middle-­aged man who has been painting his character Merferds since he was a little kid. When he moved to Ferguson, he continued drawing the image. In the aftermath of the death of Michael Brown’s, he continued to paint this figure, adding his hands up with the hashtag #HandsUpLetsPray. For a short film on Berwick and his creation, see Josh Herum’s The Man behind the Merferds (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1cJFHT7vUA). 30. Hands Up Let’s Pray (@handsupletspray), Twitter profile, https://twitter .com/handsupletspray. 31. Gambill and Montgomery, Let’s Heal STL, 127, 108, 65, 75. 32. “Ferguson Protests: What We Know about Michael Brown’s Last Minutes,” BBC News, November 25, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-­us-­canada-­28 841715. In the short film The Man behind the Merferds, directed by Josh Herum, Phil Berwick states that he asked “three African Americans” if they thought it was all right to switch the “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” to “Hands Up Let’s Pray.” According to the artist, they said they thought it was fine; as a result, Berwick stated, “I thought I had the community’s blessing to do that.” Berwick is a religious man who in the film comes across as someone who wanted to do right for Ferguson. However, his embrace of a color-­blind religious sentiment that erases the very real racial bias that led to Michael Brown’s death needs to be questioned. 33. Alireza, “Tehran’s Graffiti War,” The Observers, March 2, 2010, https://obser vers.france24.com/en/20100302-­tehran- ­graffiti-­war- ­green-­movement-­basij-­mili tia-­spray-­paint-­tags. The “V” letters, mostly placed on side streets, were responded to quickly by the Basij, a paramilitary organization with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. 34. Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (New York: W. W. Norton), 306. 35. Ralph Baker, “The Decisive Weapon: a Brigade Combat Team Commander’s Perspective on Information Operations,” Military Review 86, no. 3 (2006): 13–32, as discussed in Kurt Iveson, “The Wars on Graffiti and the New Military Urbanism,” City 14 (2010): 115–34. 36. Soraya Morayef, “Graffiti War: The Street versus Pepsi,” suzeeinthecity (blog), https://suzeeinthecity.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/graffiti-­war-­the-­street-­versus -­pepsi/. 37. While art wash is a recognized term, I am specifically employing it in the way that Rafael Schachter does in his article that explores “street art” and the “creative city.” See Raphael Schachter, “The Ugly Truth: Street Art, Graffiti and the Creative City,” Art and the Public Sphere 3, no. 2 (December 2014): 161–76.

Notes to Pages 24 – 28  : 231

chapter 1 1. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (New York: Verso Books, 2012), 172. 2. Andrea Mubi Brighenti, “At the Wall: Graffiti Writers, Urban Territoriality, and the Public Domain,” Space and Culture 13, no. 3 (2010): 322. 3. Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 197, 282; Peter Lagerquist, “Fencing the Last Sky: Excavating Palestine after Israeli’s ‘Separation Wall,’” Journal of Palestine Studies 33, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 45. 4. Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 24. 5. William Booth and Sufian Taha, “A Palestinian Daily Commute through an Israeli Checkpoint,” Washington Post, May 25, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost .com/graphics/ world/occupied/checkpoint/. 6. Secure Fence Act of 2006, H.R. 6061, 109th Cong., 2nd Sess., https://www .govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-­109hr6061enr/pdf/BILLS-­109hr6061enr.pdf. 7. Brown, Walled States, 8. For a specific focus on Trump’s lauding of Israel’s use of the Separation Wall, see Seraj Assi, “Just Ask Israel,” Jacobin, January 10, 2019, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/01/trump-­israel-­separation-­wall-­apartheid. 8. “Saudi Arabia Builds Giant Yemen Border Fence,” BBC News, April 9, 2013, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-­middle-­east-­220862319. 9. “Uzbekistan Builds Wall on Border with Kyrgyzstan to Solve Disputed Land Issue,” Trend News Agency, June 23, 2009, http://en.trend.az/azerbaijan/politics /1492235.html. 10. Stéphane Rosière and Reece Jones, “Teichopolitics: Re-­considering Globalisation through the Role of Walls and Fences,” Geopolitics 17, no. 1 (2012): 226. 11. Said Saddiki, World of Walls: The Structures, Roles and Effectiveness of Separation Barriers (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2017), 57–81. 12. Trevor Boddy, “Architecture Emblematic: Hardened Sites and Softened Symbols,” in Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Routledge, 2008), 301. 13. Ibid., 57–81. 14. Quoted in Brown, Walled States, 119. 15. For a review of the large numbers of migrant workers in agriculture, see Philip Martin, Harvest of Confusion: Migrant Workers in U.S. Agriculture (New York: Routledge, 2018), 21–70. 16. Brown, Walled States, 92. 17. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2004). 18. This power dynamic is similar to the way that Israeli settlements on Palestinian land have been built by Palestinian artisans. See Andrew Ross, Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel (New York: Verso, 2019), for a compelling discussion and interviews with these men. 19. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 392.

232 : Notes to Pages 28 – 35

20. Arun Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror (New York: Verso, 2014), 1–26. 21. Boddy, “Architecture Emblematic,” 278. 22. Brown, Walled States, 103. 23. Katie Mettler, “Trump Again Mentioned Taped-­Up Women at the Border: Experts Don’t Know What He Is Talking About,” Washington Post, January 25, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/17/trumps- ­stories-­taped-­up -­women-­smuggled-­into-­us-­are-­divorced-­reality-­experts-­say/. 24. Adrian Forty, “Concrete and Memory,” in Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City, ed. Mark Crinson (New York: Routledge, 2005), 80. 25. Ibid., 75, 85, 79. 26. Owen Hatherley, Landscapes of Communism: A History through Buildings (New York: New Press, 2016), 76–79. 27. Of course, not all churches open to people in times of need. For one recent example, see Oliver McAteer’s “Joel Osteen Explains Why He Didn’t Open His Megachurch for Hurricane Harvey Victims,” Metro, August 30, 2017, https://metro .co.uk/2017/08/30/joel- ­osteen- ­explains-­why-­he- ­didnt- ­open-­his-­megachurch-­for -­hurricane-­harvey-­victims-­6891217/?ito=cbshare. 28. K. Bonacker, Benton: Ein Baustoff wird Schlagwort, 87, as quoted in Forty, “Concrete and Memory,” 86n2. 29. Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime (Riverside, NY: Ariadne Press, 1998). Schacter describes in much detail Loos’s argument and places the architect’s theories within the context of graffiti and street art. See Rafael Schacter, Ornament and Order: Graffiti, Street Art and the Parergon (New York: Routledge, 2016), 28–32. 30. Derrida, 1998, in Anne M. Cronin, “Urban Space and Entrepreneurial Property Relations, Resistance and the Vernacular in Outdoor Advertising and Graffiti,” in Consuming the Entrepreneurial City: Image, Memory, Spectacle, ed. Anne Cronin and Keith Hetherington (London: Routledge), 17. 31. Tim Cresswell, “Heretical Geographies,” in In Place/Out of Place: Geogra‑ phy, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 57. 32. See Iain Borden’s Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001) and Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019) for his keen analysis of the relationship between the skateboarder and the city. 33. Danielle Abulhawa, “Smoothing Space in Palestine: Building a Skatepark and a Socio-­Political Forum with the SkatePal Charity,” Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (2017): 417–26; Danielle Abulhawa, Skateboarding and Femininity: Gender, Space-­Making and Expressive Movement (London: Routledge, 2020). 34. Asef Bayat, Life as Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 195. 35. As quoted in Anne Cronin, “Urban Space and Entrepreneurial Property Relations,” 17. 36. Forty, Concrete and Memory, 75. 37. The dismantling of confederate monuments across the United States in the

Notes to Pages 35 – 3 8  : 233

summer of 2020 as a direct result of the killing of George Floyd by white police officers and the massive Black Lives Matter protests that engulfed the country in the aftermath of his and other Black folks’ deaths are clear testaments to the insecurity of monuments to hold their place in national reverence. Donald Trump’s reaction to the dismantling—his Twitter performances defending the monuments, as well as his statements that anyone who vandalized national monuments would get ten years in jail—speaks to his and his enablers’ desperate grasping to keep hold of political power through symbols of white nationalism. 38. Steve Ludwig, “Lights, Camera, Rescue,” Seattle Post-­Intelligencer, May 29, 2003, https://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Lights-­camera-­rescue-­1115858.php; David Zucchino, “Army Stage-­Managed Fall of Hussein Statue,” Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2004, http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jul/03/nation/na-­statue3. 39. Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason (New York: Peter Lang), 5. 40. James Meek and Suzanne Goldberg, “The Day the Statue Fell,” The Guard‑ ian, March 19, 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/mar/19/iraq.jam esmeek. 41. After Hussein’s statue was destroyed, the new interim government commissioned a sculpture by Bassem Hamad al-­Dawiri that would represent the unity of Iraq after the US-­led invasion. This public art is, suitably, an abstract sculpture that is contemplative and open to interpretation. 42. Jaime Rojo and Steven Harrington, “HAD Collective: ‘Silence’ Stirs Memories of War in Bosnian Town,” Huffpost Blog, last modified December 6, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/had-­street-­art-­silence-­bosnia_b_9198372. 43. The First Intifada has often been called a “war of stones.” Palestinian youth, unable to match the weaponry of Israel, gathered stones from the broken walls of their destroyed houses and used them as artillery. 44. Stan Van Steendam explains this concept in Reading the Streets: Fading City Typography (Antwerp, Belgium: Luster, 2015). 45. Tim Cresswell, “Night Discourse: Producing/Consuming Meaning on the Street,” in Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space, ed. Nicholas Fyfe (New York: Routledge, 1998), 270. 46. Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 12. 47. Ibid. 48. Christopher Gray, ed. and trans., Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationists (London: Free Fall, 1974), quoted in Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 171. 49. As quoted in Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 173. 50. As quoted in Schacter, Ornament and Order, 92. 51. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rebel Press, 2001), 205. 52. There are many scholars—Joe Austin, Jeff Ferrell, Raphael Schacter, and Luke Dickens, among others—who have focused in their various articles and

234 : Notes to Page s 3 8 – 4 6

books on the Situationists as theoretical forbearers of the graffiti writers of the contemporary period, and this section is indebted to all of those scholars’ work. Although this graffiti “drifting” (to use Ferrell’s terminology) can be found in any number of uploaded graffiti-­centered videos on YouTube, an example of Situationist drifting can be seen in the scenes of Earsnot’s tagging New York City in Doug Pray’s documentary Infamy (2005). 53. Edward Soja, “Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis,” as quoted in Nicholas Fyfe, ed., Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space (New York: Routledge, 1998), 4. 54. Mona Abaza, “Cairo’s Downtown Imagined: Dubaisation or Nostalgia,” Urban Studies 48, no. 6 (2011): 187. 55. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1995), 54. 56. Stan Van Steendam, Reading the Streets: Fading City Typography (London: Luster, 2015), 13. 57. David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2013), 117. 58. Harvey, Rebel Cities, ix–­xviii. 59. Soraya Morayef, “In the Midst of Madness: Graffiti of the Ultras on Mohamed Mahmoud Street,” suzeeinthecity (blog), February 8, 2011, https://suzeeinthecity .wordpress.com/2012/02/08/in-­the-­midst- ­of-­madness- ­graffiti- ­of-­the-­ultras- ­on -­mohamed-­mahmoud-­street/. 60. Simon Sheikh, “Publics and Post-­Publics: The Production of the Social,” in “Art as a Public Issue: How Art and Its Institutions Reinvent the Public Dimension,” ed. Jorinde Seijdel, special issue, Open, no. 14 (Rotterdam: NAi Booksellers, 2008). 61. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso), 101–10. 62. Chantal Mouffe, “Art as an Agnostic Intervention in Public Space,” in “Art as a Public Issue: How Art and Its Institutions Reinvent the Public Dimension,” ed. Jorinde Seijdel, special issue, Open, no. 14 (Rotterdam: NAi Booksellers, 2008): 6–15. 63. Ibid., 33. 64. Sheikh, “Publics and Post-­Publics,” 8. 65. Chantal Mouffe, Agnostics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso Books, 2013), 8. 66. Personal interview with Mira Shihadeh, July 2014, Cairo. 67. Vito Acconci, “Public Space in a Private Time,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 901. I am grateful for the scholarship of Simon Sheikh, which introduced me to Acconci’s work. 68. Ibid., 905. 69. Ivan Krastev, Democracy Disrupted: The Global Politics of Protest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 54. 70. Ibid., 59. 71. Thomas Harding, “Col Gaddafi Killed-­Convoy Bombed by Drone Flown by

Notes to Pages 4 6 – 53  : 235

Pilot in Las Vegas,” The Telegraph, October 20, 2011, https://www.telegraph.co.uk /news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8839964/Col-­Gaddafi-­killed- ­con voy-­bombed-­by-­drone-­flown-­by-­pilot-­in-­Las-­Vegas.html. 72. Translation by Cat Modlin-­Jackson. 73. Philippe Desmazes was also credited for taking a picture of a cell phone video of an NTC soldier that depicts a badly beaten Gadhafi right before his death. For a description of how Desmazes captured the photo, see Bob Andelman, “AFP, AP Transmit Graphic Photos of Dead Gadhafi,” Poynter, October 20, 2011, https:// www.poynter.org/reporting- ­editing/2011/ap-­transmits- ­gaddafi- ­death-­images -­video/. 74. H. M. Ghouma, “Graffiti in Libya as Meaningful Literacy,” Arab World English Journal 6, no. 1 (2015): 397. 75. Soumiea Abushagur, The Art of Uprising: The Libyan Revolution in Graffiti (New York: Lulu Publishing, 2011). 76. Wayne Cocroft, Danielle Devlin, and Robert Gowing, Military Wall Art: Guidelines on Its Significance, Conservation and Management (Swindon, UK: English Heritage, 2004). 77. Katherine Reed, “ ‘Charcoal Scribblings of the Most Rascally Character’: Conflict, Identity, and Testimony in American Civil War Graffiti,” American Nineteenth Century History 16, no. 2 (2015): 111–27. 78. Kim A. O’Connell, “Graffiti and the Civil War,” New York Times, July 25, 2014, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/25/graffiti-­and-­the-­civil-­war/. 79. Matti Friedman, “Israel Restores Graffiti from 1948,” San Diego Union-­ Tribune, May 11, 2011, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-­israel-­restores -­graffiti-­from-­1948-­war-­2011may11-­story.html. 80. Friedman, “Israel Restores Graffiti from 1948.” 81. Ralph Baker, “The Decisive Weapon: a Brigade Combat Team Commander’s Perspective on Information Operations,” Military Review 86, no. 3 (2006): 13–32, as discussed in Kurt Iveson “The Wars on Graffiti and the New Military Urbanism,” City 14 (2010): 115–34. 82. Lee Beltrone and Art Beltrone, Vietnam Graffiti: Messages from a Troopship (Charlottesville, VA: Howell Press, 2004), 33. 83. Ibid., 55. 84. Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 58. 85. “Transit Association Ship a Streetcar to Shelter Family of ‘Kilroy Was Here,’” New York Times, December 24, 1946. 86. Advertisement, Life, May 17, 1945, 120. 87. Robert Sickels, The 1940s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing), 113. 88. For a wide range of articles on Kilroy and his antecedents, see “Kilroy Was Here in 1937 . . . Well, Not Really,” Sightings, http://kilroywashere.org/001-­Pages /01-­0KilroySightings-­4.html; Eric Partridge and Paul Beale, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English: Colloquialisms and Catch Phrases, Fossilized Jokes and Puns, General Nicknames, Vulgarisms and Such Americanisms as Have Been Natu-

236 : Notes to Page s 5 4 – 63

ralised (New York: Routledge, 2002), 194; “Mr. Chad Travels,” Schenectady (NY) Gazette, October 12, 1946; “Once Honorably Discharged, Kilroy Is Here, but No Some,” Milwaukee Journal, December 9, 1946. 89. I want to thank Dr. Eric Morales-­Franceschini and Dr. Anne Garland Mahler, who brought this to my attention after I presented a paper on this subject at the American Studies Association in Atlanta in 2018. 90. Handala, “Who Is Handala?” http://www.handala.org/handala/. 91. N. al-­Ali, M. Darwish, S. Issa, R. Abu-­Shawar, K. Sawahiri, I. Manasrah, et al., Al-­Hadiyya lam tasil ba’ad [The gift has not yet arrived] (Amman: Dar al-­Karmel, 1997), as quoted in O. A. Najjar, “Cartoons as a Site for the Construction of a Palestinian Refugee Identity: An Exploratory Study of Cartoonist Naji al-­Ali,” Journal of Communication Theory 31, no. 3. ( July 2007): 273. 92. Najjar, “Cartoons as a Site for the Construction of a Palestinian Refugee Identity: An Exploratory Study of Cartoonist Naji al-­Ali,” Journal of Communication Theory 31, no. 3. ( July 2007), 271. 93. Ibid. 94. Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski, “Witnessing as a Field,” in Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication (London: Springer, 2008), 133. 95. Ken Livingston, “Criticism of Israel and Anti-­Semitism,” Guardian (Sydney), March 6, 2019, https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/ielapa.2586499788 51661. 96. Naji al-­Ali, A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji al-­Ali (New York: Verso, 2009), 113. 97. Ibid., 83. 98. Ibid., 87. 99. Audrey Warne, “ ‘Miki Kratsman: People I Met’ at USF Contemporary Art Museum,” Catalyst (New College of Florida), October 3, 2018. https://ncfcatalyst .com/miki-­kratsman-­people-­i-­met-­at-­usf-­contemporary-­art-­museum/.

chapter 2 1. Soraya Morayef, a freelance writer, blogger, and Cairo resident, has been following the graffiti scene since the onset of the “Arab Spring.” She wrote about Ganzeer and the battle over Tank vs. Bike in “War on Graffiti—SCAF Vandalists versus Graffiti Artists,” suzeeinthecity (blog), February 6, 2012, https://suzeeinthecity.wo rdpress.com/2012/02/06/war-­on-­graffiti-­scaf-­vandalists-­versus-­graffiti-­artists/. 2. Ali Khaled, “From the Arab Spring Comes a Cultural Awakening,” National, May 18, 2011, https://www.thenational.ae/from-­the-­arab-­spring-­comes-­a-­cultural -­awakening-­1.375759. 3. Saskia Sassen, “The Global Street: Making the Political” Globalizations 8, no. 5 (2011): 579. 4. For a discussion and examples of specific conflict graffiti, see Matt Kenard, “Global Art Uprising,” The Indypendent, March 30, 2012, https://indypendent.org /2012/03/global-­art-­uprising/; Frederick Baker, “The Red Army Graffiti in the Reichstag, Berlin: Politics of Rock-­Art in a Contemporary European Urban Land-

Notes to Pages 63 – 67  : 237

scape,” in European Landscapes of Rock-­Art, ed. Christopher Chippindale and George Nash (London: Routledge, 2001), 20–38; Ella Chmielewska, “Framing [Con]text: Graffiti and Place,” Space and Culture 10, no. 2 (2007): 145–69. 5. For a discussion of graffiti in Tunisia, see Nicholas Korody, “The Revolutionary Art: Street Art before and after the Tunisian Revolution” (Independent Study Project Collection Paper No. 1134, Vassar College, Fall 2011), http://digitalcollections .sit.edu/isp_collection/1134. For an account of Gaddafi’s last hours with photographs of the graffiti-­covered tunnel where he was killed, see Ben Farmer, “Gaddafi’s Final Hours: NATO and the SAS Helped Rebels Drive Hunted Leader into Endgame in a Desert Drain,” The Telegraph, October 22, 2011, https://www.tele graph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8843684/Gaddafis -­final-­hours-­Nato-­and-­the-­SAS-­helped-­rebels- ­drive-­hunted-­leader-­into- ­endgame -­in-­a-­desert-­drain.html. For a discussion on conflict graffiti in Bahrain, see Rom Levy, “An Introduction to Street Art in the Kingdom of Bahrain,” Street Art News, September 7, 2013, https://streetartnews.net/2013/09/street-­art-­in-­bahrain.html. 6. Kim Dovey, Simon Wollan, and Ian Woodcock, “Placing Graffiti: Creating and Contesting Character in Inner-­City Melbourne,” Journal of Urban Design 17, no. 1 (2012): 37. 7. Mona Abaza, “Walls, Segregating Downtown Cairo and the Mohammed Mahmud Street Graffiti,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 1 (2013): 122. 8. Shadi Hamid, “Egypt: The Prize,” in The Arab Awakening: America and the Transformation of the Middle East, ed. Kenneth Pollack et al. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2011), 102–3. 9. Robin Wright, Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 21–24. 10. Ibid., 23. 11. Chmielewska, “Framing [Con]text,” 163. 12. Bruno David and Meredith Wilson, “Spaces of Resistance: Graffiti and Indigenous Place Markings in the Early European Contact Period of Northern Australia,” in Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Place, ed. Bruno David and Meredith Wilson (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 42–60. 13. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (New York: Sage Publications, 1993), 80. 14. Wael Salah Fahmi, “Bloggers’ Street Movement and the Right to the City: (Re)claiming Cairo’s Real and Virtual ‘Spaces of Freedom,’ ” Environment and Urbanization 21, no. 1 (April 1, 2009): 99. 15. Rachel Mairs, “8 Egyptian ‘Inscriptions’ and Greek ‘Graffiti’ at El Kanais in the Egyptian Eastern Desert,” in Ancient Graffiti in Context, ed. J. A. Baird and Claire Taylor (New York: Routledge, 2010), 153–64. 16. Iman Mersal, “Revolutionary Humor,” Globalizations 8, no. 5 (2011): 672. 17. Mahmoud Aly, “Interview with Mahmoud Graffiti, a Graffiti Writer in Alexandria, Egypt,” interview by John Lennon, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 25 (2013): http://www.rhizomes.net/issue25/index.html. 18. Basma Hamdy and Don Karl, Walls of Freedom: Street Art of the Egyptian Revolution (Berlin: From Here to Fame Publishing, 2014), 9.

238 : Notes to Pages 67 – 74

19. Jano Charbel, “Graffiti and Street Art in Egypt,” she2i2 (blog), March 9, 2010, http://she2i2.blogspot.com/2010/03/graffiti-­street-­art-­in-­egypt.html. 20. According to data released by the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, an Egyptian organization established in 2006 by a group of lawyers and researchers to defend freedom of expression, at least twenty-­two street artists have been arrested from 2011 to 2018. See Karim Assad, “Egypt’s Authorities Seek to Wipe Out Graffiti Artists,” Al-­Monitor: The Pulse of the Middle East, February 9, 2018, http://www.al-­monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/02/egypts-­graffiti -­art-­suffers-­after-­the-­revolution.html#ixzz56uOuHIFd. 21. Joel Gulhane, “Rights Group Condemns Proposed Graffiti Law,” Daily News Egypt, November 6, 2013, https://ww.dailynewssegypt.com/2013/11/06/rights-­gro up-­condemns-­proposed-­graffiti-­law/. 22. Giuseppe Acconcia, “Ammar Abo Bakr, Graffiti Artist,” Slow Words, September 18, 2014, http://www.slow-­words.com/ammar-­abo-­bakr-­graffiti-­artist/; Mona Baker, “Is Cairene Graffiti Losing Momentum?” Mona Baker: Oppression Is Not a Point of View (blog), January 27, 2015, https://monabaker.org/post/is-­cairene -­graffiti-­losing-­momentum/. 23. Mark Halsey and Ben Pederick, “The Game of Fame: Mural, Graffiti, Erasure,” City 14, no. 1–2 (2010): 93. 24. Mersal, “Revolutionary Humor,” 672. 25. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 257. 26. Chmielewska, “Framing [Con]text,” 148. 27. For a concise reading of “assemblage,” see J. Macgregor Wise, “Assemblage,” in Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, ed. O. Stivale and Charles Stivale (Montreal: McGill-­ Queen’s University Press, 2005), 77–87. 28. Personal interview with Ganzeer, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, June 2014. 29. Josh Wood, “The Maturing of Street Art in Cairo,” New York Times, July 27, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/world/middleeast/28iht-­M28-­EGYPT -­TAGS.html. 30. Personal interview with Ganzeer. 31. Angela K. Evans, “Context Is Everything,” Boulder Weekly, November 16, 2017, https://www.boulderweekly.com/entertainment/arts-­culture/context-­is-­eve rything/. 32. Carol Huang, “Facebook and Twitter Key to Arab Uprisings: Report,” National UAE, June 6, 2011, https://www.thenational.ae/uae/facebook-­and-­twitter -­key-­to-­arab-­spring-­uprisings-­report-­1.428773. 33. Hamdy and Karl, Walls of Freedom, 27, 29, 35. 34. Anna M. Agathangelou and Nevzat Soguk, “Rocking the Kasbah: Insurrectional Politics, the ‘Arab Streets,’ and Global Revolution in the 21st Century,” Globalizations 8, no. 5 (November 2011): 552. 35. Mersal, “Revolutionary Humor,” 672. 36. Dovey, Wollan, and Woodcock, “Placing Graffiti,” 38. 37. Mersal, “Revolutionary Humor,” 672.

Notes to Pages 75 – 82  : 239

38. Personal interview with Ganzeer. 39. Ian Black, “Egypt Protest Leaflets Distributed in Cairo Give Blueprint for Mass Action,” Guardian, January 27, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/world /2011/jan/27/egypt-­protest-­leaflets-­mass-­action. 40. As quoted in Hamdy and Karl, Walls of Freedom, 21. 41. Ganzeer created this pamphlet because he felt there was a need; he saw the protest as decentered and spontaneous, and reacted quickly to the chaotic events. Because Facebook and Twitter were being monitored, he said: “I just sent it out to people I know over email and told them, ‘Send it to people you know, but delete where you got it from and tell the next person to do the same.’ ” Ganzeer used email chains—and trusted that protesters would not reveal where they received it from if questioned by authorities—to disperse his leaflet (others printed it out and photographed it to pass it along in this manner as well). Personal interview with Ganzeer. 42. Mohamed El Hebeishy, “Mad Graffiti Weekend Storms the Egyptian Capital,” Ahram Online, May 23, 2011, http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/5/0/12720 /Arts--­Culture/0/Mad-­Graffiti-­Weekend-­storms-­the-­Egyptian-­capital.aspx. 43. Kristen Chick, “Egyptian Graffiti Artist Ganzeer Arrested amid Surge in Po‑ litical Expression,” Christian Science Monitor, May 26, 2011, https://www.csmonitor .com/World/Middle-­East/2011/0526/Egyptian- ­graffiti-­artist- ­Ganzeer-­arrested -­amid-­surge-­in-­political-­expression. 44. Jano Charbel, “Graffiti Week Returns with Calls to Resume Revolution,” Egypt Independent, January 25, 2012, https://ww.egyptindependent.com/graffiti -­week-­returns-­calls-­resume-­revolution/. 45. As quoted in Hamdy and Karl, Walls of Freedom, 120. 46. Ganzeer, email message to author, August 27, 2013. 47. Hamdy and Karl, Walls of Freedom, 207. 48. Ganzeer is not alone in distancing himself from the graffiti label. Aya Tarek, an amazing artist whom I interviewed in Alexandria as well as in Florida, was a pioneer in working in the graffiti style in Alexandria years before the revolution. Tarek is not comfortable with the idea of art as “a political weapon” and sees her art as somewhat divorced from politics. This, of course, does not mean that her work has not influenced other writers of graffiti. In fact, she held a graffiti workshop before the 2011 revolution that influenced many other Cairo-­based artists and writers, including Sad Panda and Ganzeer. 49. Soraya Morayef, “Conversation with Ganzeer: The Tank, Buddha and Mad Graffiti Week,” suzeeinthecity (blog), January 11, 2012, https://suzeeinthecity.word press.com/2012/01/11/conversation-­w ith- ­ganzeer-­the-­tank-­buddha-­and-­mad -­graffiti-­week/. 50. Hamdy and Karl, Walls of Freedom, 206. 51. Personal interview with Ganzeer. 52. Ibid. 53. For a description of the city streets during Mubarak’s rule as well as organized movements to clean the streets after the Arab Spring, see Jessica Winegar,

240 : Notes to Pages 83 – 89

“Taking Out the Trash: Youth Clean Up Egypt after Mubarak,” in The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in Egypt, ed. Jeannie Sowers and Chris Toensing (London: Verso Books, 2012), 64–73. 54. Yasmine El Rashidi, “Art or Vandalism?” Index on Censorship 40, no. 3 (2011): 84, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0306422011418583. 55. Marwan M. Kraidy, “Trashing the Sectarian System? Lebanon’s ‘You Stink’ Movement and the Making of Affective Publics,” Communication and the Public 1, no. 1 (2016): 20. 56. Ibid., 21–22. 57. Ibid., 25. 58. Azza El Masri, “The Beirut Wall: An Ephemeral Exhibition of Civil Disobedience,” StepFeed, August 25, 2015, https://stepfeed.com/the-­beirut-­wall-­an -­ephemeral-­exhibition-­of-­civil-­disobedience-­3121. 59. Ivan Krestev, Democracy Disrupted: The Global Politics of Protest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 54. 60. For an expansive and rich history of graffiti in Beirut, see Marwan M. Kraidy, “Graffiti, Hypermedia and Heterotopia after the Arab Uprisings: New Media Practices and Configurations,” in New Media Configurations and Socio-­Cultural Dynamics in Asia and the Arab World?, ed. Nadja-­Christina Schneider and Carola Richter (Baden-­Baden, Germany: Nomos & Bloomsbury, 2015), 319–44. 61. Personal interview with Halwani, January 2014, Beirut, Lebanon. 62. Sara Elkamel, “Meet ‘Beirut’s Banksy,’ the Artist Who’s Transforming the City One Wall at a Time,” Huffington Post, September 4, 2015, https://www.huffing tonpost.com/entry/in-­lebanon-­an-­artist-­for-­a-­new-­generation-­is-­born_us_55e9b ff4e4b093be51bb5025. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Personal interview with Halwani. 66. Personal interview with Halwani. 67. Casey Quackenbush, “Egyptian Gallery Faces Censorship Following Police Raid and Closure,” Observer, February 22, 2016, https://observer.com/2016/02 /egyptian-­gallery-­faces-­censorship-­following-­police-­raid-­and-­closure/. 68. Jihad Abaza, “Giant Mural Brings Sunlight to Cairo’s Garbage District,” Middle East Eye, December 22, 2016, https://www.middleeasteye.net/in-­depth/fea tures/how-­beauty-­lies-­behind-­piles-­garbage-­cairo-­s-­manshiyet-­naser-­864045332. 69. Soraya Morayef, “In the Midst of Madness: Graffiti of the Ultras on Mohamed Mahmoud Street,” suzeeinthecity (blog), February 8, 2011, http://suzeeinthecity .wordpress.com/2012/02/08/in-­the-­midst- ­of-­madness- ­graffiti- ­of-­the-­ultras- ­on -­mohamed-­mahmoud-­street/. 70. David Botti, “One Street at the Centre of Cairo’s Violent Clashes,” BBC News Magazine, November 23, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-­15847140. 71. On November 19, there was an eruption of violence on this street and protesters were killed or injured, many sustaining gunshot wounds to their eyes. Murals quickly filled the walls of the streets with murals of victims who lost their eyes. Soraya Morayef, “The Revolution Continues . . . And So Does the Graffiti,”

Notes to Pages 89 – 93  : 241

suzeeinthecity (blog), December 3, 2011, http://suzeeinthecity.wordpress.com /2011/12/03/the-­revolution- ­continues-­and-­so- ­does- ­graffiti/. Much like the wall battle between Ganzeer and Badr Battalion 1, there have been frequent clashes between pro-­revolution graffiti artists and Salafists who have erased some portraits of the revolutionaries and replaced them with Quranic verses. These were then replaced by more murals. For a description of the work, see “Graffiti Artists Defend Work in Tahrir Square with ‘Quranic Verses,’ ” Ahram Online, November 9, 2011, http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/57674/Egypt/Politics -­/Graffiti-­artists-­defend-­work-­in-­Tahrir-­Square-­with.aspx. 72. Morayef, “In the Midst of Madness.” 73. Rawya Rageh, “Graffiti Convey Stories of Egypt Revolution,” Al Jazeera, Feb‑ ruary 27, 2012, http://www.aljazeera.com/video/middleeast/2012/02/201222712 4328836724.html. 74. Bradley Hope, “SCAF Try to Seal Off Dissent with Walls around Tahrir Square,” National, December 21, 2011, http://www.thenational.ae/news/world /middle-­east/scaf-­try-­to-­seal-­off-­dissent-­with-­walls-­around-­tahrir-­square. 75. Hope, “SCAF Try to Seal Off Dissent.” Some of the participants were Mohamed “El Moshir” Gad, Ammar Abo Bakr, Alaa Awad, and Laila Maged, among others. 76. As quoted in ibid. 77. Banksy, Banksy: Wall and Piece (London: Random House, 2005), 108. 78. Malihe Razazan, “An Interview with Paul Sedra: Another Victim of the Egyptian Junta—L’Institut d’Égypte,” Jadaliyya, December 22, 2011, http://www.jada liyya.com/pages/index/3725/an-­interview-­w ith-­paul-­sedra_another-­v ictim- ­of -­the. 79. Noha Ahmed, interview by John Lennon, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 25 (2012): http://www.rhizomes.net/issue25/index.html. 80. Personal telephone interview with the Freedom Painters, 2011. 81. M. Al-­Khouly, “Egypt’s New Rulers Declare War on . . . Graffiti,” Al-­Akbar English, November 10, 2011, http://english.al-­akhbar.com/node/1330. 82. Ibid. 83. Dovey, Wollan, and Woodcock, “Placing Graffiti,” 22. 84. Guisela Latorre, Walls of Empowerment: Chicana/o Indigenist Murals of California (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 21. 85. Dismissing this type of “legal” graffiti in Adelaide, South Australia, Halsey and Pederick see an inherent component or function of graffiti to be its connection to vandalism: “In order to engage—in order to be a player at the table of bureaucracy (urban and community planning)—graffiti must function as its own form of erasure. Its forms and contents can be muralized, stylized, sanitized— even problematized—but the resulting script must not be synonymous with graffiti. The city as property owner, policeman, prison guard, collector and curator can ingest or make room for all types of expression—but graffiti, in its spontaneous and ever-­changing form—is not one of these.” Halsey and Pederick, “The Game of Fame,” 58. See also Dovey, Wollan, and Woodcock, “Placing Graffiti,” 35. 86. To see the way multinational corporations have used graffiti in their ads,

242 : Notes to Pages 94 – 10 0

see Soraya Morayef, “Graffiti War—The Street versus Pepsi,” suzeeinthecity (blog), August 15, 2011, http://suzeeinthecity.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/graffiti-­war-­the -­street-­versus-­pepsi/. For a greater understanding of the way marketers have attempted to use the revolution for commercial purposes, see Eric Westervelt, “Graffiti Reclaims Egyptian Revolution from Marketers,” NPR: All Things Considered, July 3, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/07/03/137402744/artists-­street-­artists-­defe nd-­egypts-­revolutionary-­imagary. 87. Soraya Morayef, “In the Midst of Madness.” 88. Personal interview with Sad Panda and Hany, July 2014, Cairo. 89. Interview with Moza, July 2014, Facebook correspondence. 90. Soraya Morayef, “An Afternoon with Sad Panda,” suzeeinthecity (blog), July 11, 2011, https://suzeeinthecity.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/an- ­afternoon-­with-­ sad-­panda/. 91. Joe Austin, Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 44. 92. Ganzeer’s work has certainly expanded since 2011. At the time of writing, Ganzeer’s most recent work is the comic The Solar Grid (https://thesolargrid.net).

chapter 3 1. Public Delivery staff, “Girl With Balloon, Banksy’s Most Inspiring Painting?” Public Delivery, https://publicdelivery.org/banksy-­girl-­with-­red-­balloon/. 2. Nick Logan, “Banksy’s Balloon Girl Transformed for #WithSyria Campaign,” Global News, March 13, 2014, http://globalnews.ca/news/1206757/banksys-­ballo on-­girl-­transformed-­for-­withsyria-­campaign/. 3. Martha Busby, “Woman Who Bought Shredded Banksy Artwork Will Go Through with Purchase.” The Guardian, October 11, 2018. https://www.theguar dian.com/artanddesign/2018/oct/11/woman- ­w ho-­b ought-­shredded-­b anksy -­artwork-­will-­go-­through-­with-­sale. 4. Inked magazine staff, “Tattoos Inspired by the Art of Banksy,” Inked, October 20, 2014, http://www.inkedmag.com/tattoos-­inspired-­art-­banksy/. 5. Maev Kennedy, “Banksy Stencil Soars Past Hay Wain as UK’s Favorite Work of Art,” The Guardian, July 26, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/artandde sign/2017/jul/26/banksy-­balloon- ­girl-­hay-­w ain-­favourite-­uk-­work- ­of-­art- ­con stable-­poll-­nation. 6. “Flying Balloon Girl Israel Banksy Art Coffee Mug,” at Overstock.com, https:// www.overstock.com/Home-­Garden/Flying-­Balloon-­Girl-­Israel-­Banksy-­Art-­Coffee -­Mug/10489987/product.html. It is, of course, problematic that this image is labeled as an “Israel Banksy Art Coffee Mug.” 7. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations and Reflections (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1936), 243. 8. In another iconic image near Bethlehem that Banksy painted in 2005, a man with a backward cap and a bandana on his face is throwing flowers instead of stones. Although a “joke,” the image needs to be read in a context in which Palestinians have been arrested and killed for throwing rocks. As discussed in this

Notes to Pages 101– 104  : 243

chapter, Banksy consistently uses Western figures without fully dialoging with sociopolitical context; instead, he attempts to speak in universalizing images. 9. Jaclynn Ashley, “Palestinians Hit Back at Graffiti Tourists,” Al Jazeera, December 27, 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/12/separation-­wall-­graffiti -­art-­occupation-­tourism-­171227184404869.html. 10. Simon Oxenham, “In Defense of Dismaland: The Value of Banksy’s Dystopian Nightmare,” Big Think, August 26, 2015, http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers /in- ­defence- ­of- ­dismaland-­the-­value- ­of-­banksys- ­dystopian-­nightmare; Bethan Mc‑Kernan, “Banksy Hotel in Palestinian West Bank with ‘Worst View in the World’ Divides Locals,” Independent, March 15, 2017, http://www.independent.co .uk/news/world/middle-­east/banksy-­hotel-­west-­bank-­palestinian-­territory-­israel -­worst-­view-­world-­local-­residents-­barrier-­fence-­a7631556.html; Lorenzo Tondo and Maurice Stierl, “Banksy Funds Rescue Refugee Boat Operating in the Mediter‑ ranean,” The Guardian, August 27, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/20 20/aug/27/banksy-­funds-­refugee-­rescue-­boat-­operating-­in-­mediterranean. 11. For a summary of Banksy’s highest-­grossing artworks that he sold at auction, see lowpro, “Viewpoints: Top 25 Most Expensive Banksy Works Ever,” Arrested Motion, September 21, 2011, https://arrestedmotion.com/2011/09/banksy -­top-­25-­most-­expensive-­works-­ever/. 12. William Ellsworth-­Jones, Banksy: The Man behind the Wall (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 28. 13. There is an unethical scholarly article that used algorithms to “find” him (I will not cite this published article). This type of “outing” by scholars and academics is not only unethical but also dangerous. 14. Eleanor Mills, “Banksy in the World’s First Disaster Street Art Movie,” Times, February 28, 2010, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/banksy-­in-­the-­worlds-­first -­street-­art-­disaster-­movie-­03fgkr6bf9s. 15. As quoted in Ellsworth-­Jones, Banksy, 123. 16. Joe La Placa, “London Calling,” Artnet, August 25, 2003, http://www.artnet .com/magazine/ reviews/laplaca/laplaca8-­25-­03.asp. 17. Some of the attention was caused by the numerous animal rights advocates who regularly protested the mistreatment of animals at Banksy’s events, including one at which a live elephant was painted and put on display. While Banksy has been accused of animal cruelty in several of his shows, he has also used his art to discuss the ethical treatment of animals, including in The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill in 2008, which showed a chicken’s “babies” as nuggets being dunked into various sauces. See Margo DeMello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-­Animal Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 16. 18. Ulrich Blanche, Banksy: Urban Art in a Material World (Berlin: Tectum Ver­ lag, 2016), 114–15. 19. Edward Wyatt, “In the Land of Beautiful People, an Artist without a Face,” New York Times, September 16, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/16/arts /design/16bank.html. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid.; Carla Hall and Amanda Covarrubias, “Painted Pachyderm Draws Out-

244 : Notes to Pages 105 – 10 9

cry,” Los Angeles Times, September 16, 2006, http://articles.latimes.com/2006/sep /16/local/me-­elephant16. 22. Edouard Louis, Who Killed My Father? (New York: New Directions, 2019), 80. 23. For a discussion of Israeli checkpoints on Palestinians, see Matthew Longo, Daphna Canetti, and Nancy Hite-­Rubin, “A Checkpoint Effect? Evidence from a Natural Experiment on Travel Restrictions in the West Bank,” American Journal of Political Science 58, no. 4 (2017): 1006–23. For a discussion of the performativity of Israeli checkpoints as expressed in film, see Anat Zanger, “Blind Space: Roadblock Movies in the Contemporary Israeli Film,” Shofar 24, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 37–48. 24. Rebecca Harrison, “Banksy’s Bethlehem Mural Erased by Residents,” Reut­ ers, December 20, 2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-­palestinians-­banksy -­idUSL2063584320071220. 25. Mirna al-­Atrash, “Police Thwart Attempt to Steal Bethlehem Banksy Mural,” Ma’an News Agency, April 20, 2015, https://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx ?id=760586. 26. Daisy Wyatt, “Banksy West Bank Mural ‘Donkey Documents’ Expected to Sell for $700k at Auction,” Independent, July 29, 2015, http://www.independent.co .uk/arts- ­entertainment/art/news/banksy- ­west-­bank-­mural- ­donkey- ­documents -­expected-­to-­sell-­for-­700k-­at-­auction-­10425007.html. 27. This history is retold in the documentary The Man Who Stole Banksy (2018), directed by Marco Proserpio. 28. “Banksy, West Bank Wall Graffiti Art, Giclee Print on Canvas, Various Sizes,” Etsy, posted by CanvasMuseum, https://www.etsy.com/listing/514261214/banksy -­west-­bank-­wall-­graffiti-­art. 29. “Banksy ‘Bombs’ Gaza: Making Art Not War in Palestine,” Foreign Affairs, June 24, 2015, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/photo-­galleries/2015-­06-­24/banksy -­bombs-­gaza. 30. Sam Jones, “Spray Can Prankster Tackles Israel’s Security Barrier,” Guardian, August 5, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/aug/05/israel.arts news. 31. “Banksy: A Guerrilla in Our Midst,” Independent, August 6, 2005, https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-­britain/banksy-­a- ­guerilla-­in- ­our-­midst -­501660.html. 32. Lila Abu-­Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (1990): 42. See also Ruba Salih and Sophie Richter-­Devroe, “Cultures of Resistance in Palestine and Beyond: On the Politics of Art, Aesthetics, and Affect,” Arab Studies Journal 22, no. 1 (2014): 11–12. 33. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Times Books, 1979), 9. 34. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad: Or the New Pilgrims’ Progress (1879; repr., New York: Digital Scanning, 2000), 488. 35. Rhasidi Khalidi, in Palestinian Identity: The Construction of a Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) states of the influential thinkers of the early Zionist movement—including Theodore Herzl, Chaim Nachman Bialik, and Max Mandelstamm—that they believed Palestine was empty and sparsely populated (101).

Notes to Pages 10 9 – 114  : 245

36. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 157. 37. Julie Peteet, Space and Mobility in Palestine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 2017), 7. 38. Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israeli’s Liberal Settler State (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 68–112. 39. Peteet, Space and Mobility, 38. In March 1993, Israel enacted an official policy of closure where Palestinian goods, labor, and people in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip were restricted and controlled. This act of closure helped separate Palestinians from their land. 40. United Nations Security Council, “Israel’s Settlements Have No Legal Validity, Constitute Flagrant Violation of International Law, Security Council Reaffirms,” 7853rd meeting, SC/12657, December 23, 2016, https://www.un.org/pre ss/en/2016/sc12657.doc.htm. As quoted in Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, eds., A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture (New York: Verso Books, 2003), 101. 41. Colonial expansion has been a part of the Zionist movement since the First Zionist Congress in 1897 called for the “colonization of Palestine by Jewish and industrial workers”; Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-­ Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 92. Theodor Herzl was a main architect, and he believed imperialism, not assimilation, was the answer. For him, Palestine could be converted from a barren uncivilized land to a suitable homeland for Jews. 42. Saree Makdisi, “The Architecture of Erasure,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 520. 43. Edward Said, preface to Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, ed. Hamid Dabashi, (London: Verso, 2006), 2. 44. Charles Townshend, “The Defense of Palestine: Insurrection and Public Security, 1936–1939,” English Historical Review 103, no. 409 (1988): 919–23. 45. As quoted in Segal and Weizman, A Civilian Occupation, 48. 46. Sharon Rotbard, “Wall and Tower,” in A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, ed. Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman (London: Verso, 2003), 42–43. 47. Rotbard, “Wall and Tower,” 51. 48. Oren Yiftachel, “Territory as the Kernel of the Nation: Space, Time and Nationalism Israel/Palestine,” Geopolitics 7, no. 2 (2002): 236. 49. W. J. T. Mitchell, Seeing through Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 586. Ruth Malul Zadka, “The Transparent Wall in Jerusalem’s Gilo’s Neighborhood” (master’s thesis, University of Leeds in Israel, Tel Aviv, 2003). 50. Personal interview with Ruth Malul-­Zadka, Jerusalem Artists’ House, March 2015. 51. Mitchell, Seeing through Race, 586. 52. Rebecca Gould, “The Materiality of Resistance: Israel’s Apartheid Wall in an Age of Globalization,” Social Text 118, no. 32 (Spring 2014): 2. 53. Ana Teresa Fernández, “Borrando la frontera,” http://anateresafernandez .com/1718-­2/.

246 : Notes to Pages 114 – 117

54. Lynn Trimble, “Why Ana Teresa Fernandez Tackles the Immigration Debate with Art Instead of Words,” Phoenix (AZ) New Times, April 7, 2016, http://www .phoenixnewtimes.com/arts/why-­ana-­teresa-­fernandez-­tackles-­the-­immigration -­debate-­with-­art-­instead-­of-­words-­8194321. 55. Jill Holsen, “Borrando la frontera: Erasing the Border,” 2018, http://anateresa fernandez.com/borrando-­la-­barda-­tijuana-­mexico/. As Roberto Bolaño shows in his novel 2666 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), which depicts the numerous femicides in border towns, this space is often violent and dangerous. See also the 2006 documentary Maquilapolis, directed by Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre, for a depiction of the lives of these women who work in maquiladoras. 56. Michelle Wallace, “Guerrilla Artfare: Ana Teresa Fernandez’s ‘Borrando la frontera’ Project Erases What Divides,” Remezcla, April 14, 2016, http://remezcla .com/features/culture/borrando-­la-­frontera-­project-­of-­ana-­teresa-­fernandez/. 57. For an excellent analysis of Cantú’s examination of the border, see Annette Portillo, “Writing Photomemories: Crossing Borders, Crossing Genres in Norma E. Cantú’s ‘Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la frontera,’” Chicana/Latina Studies 11, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 84–123. 58. Ana Ball, “Impossible Intimacies: Towards a Visual Politics of ‘Touch’ at the Israeli-­Palestinian Border,” Journal for Cultural Research 16, nos. 2–3 (April–­July 2012): 176. 59. David Hanauer, “The Discursive Construction of the Separation Wall in Abu Dis: Graffiti as political discourse,” Journal of Language and Politics 10, no. 3 (2011). This sentiment of the Separation Wall as a physical reflection of US policy is reflective of the graffiti on the wall that reads “This Wall brought to you by the U.S.” 60. There is, of course, graffiti on the wall produced by Palestinians, and there certainly has been blowback from Palestinians against “graffiti tourists.” See Jaclynn Ashly, “Palestinians Hit Back at Graffiti Tourists,” Al Jazeera, December 27, 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/ news/ 2017/12/separation-­wall-­graffiti-­art-­occu pation-­tourism-­171227184404869.html. 61. Patricia Zengerle, “Key U.S. Lawmakers Want to Boost Israel’s $38 Billion Defense Aid Package,” Reuters, February 28, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/arti cle/us-­usa-­israel-­defense/key-­u-­s-­lawmakers-­want-­to-­boost-­israels-­38-­billion-­def ense-­aid-­package-­idUSKCN1GB2NQ. 62. John Collins, Global Palestine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4, 1. 63. Many Palestinian farmers, for example, are physically separated from the olive trees that have been part of their family for generations by the wall, which bisects their land. For a discussion on the importance of olive trees to the Palestinian resistance, see Juman Simaan, “Olive Growing in Palestine: A Decolonial Ethnographic Study of Collective Daily-­Forms-­of-­Resistance,” Journal of Occupational Science 24, no. 4 (2017): 510–23. 64. Ashley Toenjes, “This Wall Speaks: Graffiti and Transnational Networks in Palestine,” Jerusalem Quarterly 61 (2015): 64. 65. Gould, “Materiality of Resistance,” 4, 14. 66. Islah Jad, “The ‘NGOization’ of the Arab Women’s Movements,” Al-­Raida

Notes to Pages 117 – 12 0  : 247

Journal, no. 100 (Winter 2003): 38–42, http://www.alraidajournal.com/index.php /ALRJ/article/view/442. 67. Gargi Bhattacharyya, “Globalizing Racism and Myths of the Other in the ‘War on Terror,’ ” in Thinking Palestine, ed. Ronn Lentin (New York: Zed Books, 2008), 96. 68. Graffiti culture, though, is not monolithic. Jessica Nydia Pabón-­Colón’s Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2018) shows clearly that there is a vibrant female-­centered graffiti scene in various parts of the world and that this history has been minimized or erased. 69. Nigel Parry, “Well Known UK Graffiti Artist Banksy Hacks the Wall,” Electronic Intifada, September 2, 2005, https://electronicintifada.net/content/well -­known-­uk-­graffiti-­artist-­banksy-­hacks-­wall/5733. 70. Laura Secorun Palet, “Murad Subay: The Banksy of Yemen,” OZY, July 24, 2014, https://www.ozy.com/rising-­stars/murad-­subay-­the-­banksy-­of-­yemen/32863; Dorian Geiger, “Yemen: Art, Love, Bombs and Bans,” Al Jazeera, February 17, 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/02/yemen-­art-­love-­bombs-­ba ns-­170213090154650.html. 71. Marwan M. Kraidy and Marina R. Krikorian, “The Politics of Street Art in Yemen (2012–2017),” Communication and the Public 2, no. 2 (2017): 7. 72. Murad Subay, Death by Hunger and Disease, Ruins graffiti campaign, Sana’a, Yemen, https://muradsubay.com/campaigns/ruins/#jp-­carousel-­3292. 73. Murad Subay, The Family Photo, Ruins graffiti campaign, Sana’a, Yemen, https://muradsubay.com/campaigns/ruins/#jp-­carousel-­2748. 74. Charlotte Alfred, “Yemeni Street Artist Covers the Ruins of War in Color and Memories,” Huffington Post, April 22, 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com /entry/yemen-­street-­artist_us_57193277e4b0d0042da8a374. 75. Murad Subay, The Walls Remember Their Faces, graffiti campaign, Sana’a, Yemen, https://muradsubay.com/campaigns/the-­walls-­remember-­their-­faces/. 76. Abubakr Al-­Shamahi, “Yemeni Street Artist Uses Sana’a Walls to Remember the Disappeared,” Guardian, October 13, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com /world/2013/oct/31/yemeni-­street-­artist-­disappeared-­sanaa-­walls. Subay and his fellow participants placed the faces and names of the disappeared on the walls of the intelligence agency and near the offices of the ex-­president Saleh and the general Ali Mohsen al-­Ahmar. 77. Anahi Alviso-­Marino, “The Politics of Street Art in Yemen,” Communication and the Public 2, no. 2 (2017): 127. 78. Alfred, “Yemeni Street Artist Covers the Ruins.” 79. Alviso-­Marino, “The Politics of Street Art in Yemen,” 127. 80. Other disappeared men are also suspected to have been admitted under assumed names to retirement homes and hospitals throughout Yemen—­security forces have been accused of dropping off men they tortured under assumed names. Sanaacamel, “Family of Ahmed G. Masraba, an Enforced Disappearance,” Black Camel, March 9, 2013, https://allsanaa.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/family -­of-­ahmed-­g-­masrabah-­an-­enforced-­diaspperance/.

248 : Notes to Pages 121– 124

81. Alviso-­Marino, “The Politics of Street Art in Yemen,” 127. 82. J. Farhat, “Justice for the Disappeared in Yemen?” Al-­Akhbar (English), January 9, 2013, http://english.al-­akhbar.com/content/justice-­disappeared-­yemen. 83. Julie Peteet, “The Writing on the Walls: The Graffiti of the Intifada,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 2 (1996): 140. 84. Nami Nasrallah, “The First and Second Palestinian Intifadas,” Routledge Handbook on the Israeli-­Palestinian Conflict, ed. Joel Peters (New York: Routledge, 2013), 61, 56. 85. David McDowall, Palestine and Israel: The Uprising and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 1. 86. Walid Salem, “Human Security from Below: Palestinian Citizens Protection Strategies, 1988–2005,” in The Viability of Human Security, ed. Monica den Boer and Jaap de Wilde (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 190. For a discussion of The Wanted 18, (dir. Paul Cowan and Amer Shanali, 2014) a film about Palestinians hiding eighteen cows from Israeli forces, see https://justvision.org /wanted18. 87. Peteet, “The Writing on the Walls,” 140. 88. Ibid., 153. 89. Military Order 101 (1067), “Prohibition of Acts of Incitement and Hostile Propaganda,” states that “No publications can be bought in, sold, printed or kept in someone’s possession in the West Bank unless a permit has been obtained for them.” Joost Hilterman, Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women’s Movements in the Occupied Territories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 105–6. 90. Peteet, “The Writing on the Walls,” 154, 143, 144. 91. Ibid., 86. 92. Hanauer, “The Discursive Construction,” 315. 93. Peteet, Space and Mobility, 57. 94. The major cities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have a large street-­art scene, graffiti shops (including Capzoola), and graffiti tours (“Graffiti-­Tiyul in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem,” Feel the Street: Grafitiyul, https://en.grafitiyul.co.il/). In Tel Aviv, I interviewed an US street artist who had come to Israel to find out more about his Jewish heritage. He discovered a connection with graffiti writers who embraced him and since moved to Israel permanently. There are also political organizations such as Artists 4 Israel, a nonprofit group that has gathered over a thousand participating artists from twenty-­one countries to paint graffiti throughout the world including in areas whose land in in dispute. See Ron Friedman, “Artists 4 Israel Bring Some Color to Sderot,” Jerusalem Post, April 28, 2010, https://www.jpost .com/Arts-­and-­Culture/Arts/Artists-­4-­Israel-­bring-­some-­color-­to-­Sderot; Craig Der‑ showitz, “Spray Painting a Pro-­Israeli Message with Artists 4 Israel,” Jerusalem Post, February 6, 2019, https://www.jpost.com/Jerusalem-­Report/Artists-­4-­Israel -­579880. 95. Craig Larkin, “Jerusalem’s Separation Wall and Global Message Board: Graffiti, Murals, and the Art of Sumud,” Arab Studies Journal 22, no. 1 (2014): 135. 96. This type of resistance can be seen clearly in Miki Kratsman’s short film 70 Meters . . . White T-­shirt (2017), which chronicles a year of Palestinians pro-

Notes to Pages 124 – 128  : 249

testing against the Separation Wall in the village of Nabi Salih. Jessenia Rivera, “New CAM Exhibition Explores Israeli-­Palestinian Conflict through the Eyes of the Artist,” Oracle, August 21, 2018, http://www.usforacle.com/2018/ 08/21/new-­cam -­exhibition-­explores-­israeli-­palestinian-­conflict-­through-­the-­eyes-­of-­the-­artist/. 97. Ahmad Al-­Bazz, “Farewell to an Israeli Partner in the Palestinian Struggle,” +972, October 30, 2016, https://972mag.com/farewell-­to-­an-­israeli-­partner-­in-­the -­palestinian-­struggle/122901/. 98. Ibid. 99. Raziye Akkoc, “Banksy in Gaza: Street Artist Goes Undercover in the Strip,” Telegraph, February 26, 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/banksy/11436 286/Banksy-­in-­Gaza-­Street-­artist-­goes-­undercover-­in-­the-­Strip.html. 100. In the one that has gained the most media attention and was the lead photo for numerous newspaper discussions of his art in Gaza, Banksy painted a large cat with a pink bow playing with what looks to be a ball of yarn. On closer inspection, though, the yarn is not painted onto the wall but is part of the twisted metal debris of the recent bombings. On his website he stated: “A local man came up and said ‘Please—what does this mean?’ I explained I wanted to highlight the destruction in Gaza by posting photos on my website—but on the internet people only look at pictures of kittens.” This cat mural and the way Banksy frames the discussion is similar to the elephant-­in-­the-­room punch line (or stunt) from his show Barely Legal—the dissonance of a drawing of a cat in a place of such destruction stops the viewer for a minute. Although certainly more specific than the ambiguous “water rights” of Barely Legal, the cat image is cheeky fun that highlights the Gaza Strip but could essentially be about any conflict—the dissonance is not specific to Gaza; rather, the “joke” is the aesthetic interplay of a pretty white cat with a bow playing with a ball of debris from a destroyed home. While Banksy’s murals in Gaza are derivative of many of his previous art pieces, what I find interesting is the additional information he includes on his website to frame the murals he created. By adding the text of his response to the Palestinian man asking about the cat, Banksy uses humor but in a way that calls Western compliance and indifference into question. Through this interplay of image and words, he is emphasizing his point. 101. Jan Selby, Water, Power and Politics in the Middle East: The Other Israeli-­ Palestinian Conflict (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003). 102. “Make This the Year you Discover a New Destination,” YouTube video, 1:55, posted by banksyfilm, February 25, 2015, https://youtu.be/3e2dShY8jIo. 103. “After Banksy: The Parkour Guide to Gaza,” YouTube video, 2:33, posted by The Guardian, March 10, 2015, https://youtu.be/ZuHsRm5FBvA; Jennifer L. Kelly “Welcome to Gaza: On the Politics of Invitation and the Right to Tourism” (presentation, American Studies Conference, Atlanta, November 10, 2018). 104. Tara John, “Banksy Opens Dystopian Hotel Near Bethlehem Separation Wall,” Time, March 3, 2017, http://time.com/4690180/banksy-­walled-­off-­hotel-­be thlehem/. 105. Mark Brown, “Banksy’s Dismaland: ‘Amusements and Anarchism’ in Artist’s Biggest Project Yet,” The Guardian, August 20, 2015, https://www.theguardian

250 : Notes to Pages 128 – 134

.com/artanddesign/2015/aug/20/banksy- ­dismaland-­amusements-­anarchism -­weston-­super-­mare. 106. Walled Off Hotel, “Questions,” http://walledoffhotel.com/questions.html. 107. Ibid. 108. Rebecca Gould, “Materiality of Resistance,” 9; “Menu Written on West Bank Barrier,” BBC News, September 25, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/midd le_east/7635585.stm; Dali Nammari, “Bethlehem Adapts to Life in Shadow of the Israeli Wall,” San Diego Union-­Tribune, December 23, 2008, http://www.sandiego uniontribune.com/sdut-­ml- ­christmas-­w alled-­b ethlehem-­122308-­2008dec23 -­story.html. 109. Other activist groups have used the Separation Wall to pro­ject images on it. For example, in 2008, DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency, a political collective from Beit Shour, Palestine) projected an open-­air cinema onto the deserted army base of Oush Grab, transforming a former military watchtower into a cinema; see Gil Z. Hochberg, Visual Occupation: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 1. But is this art project different from showing regular sports matches on the wall? Does the former call attention to the structure of occupying power while the latter normalizes the wall? Or are both complicit in making the architecture of conflict normalized? 110. Peter Beaumont, “Palestinians Crash Banksy’s ‘Street Party’ Satirising Balfour Celebrations,” The Guardian, November 1, 2017, https://www.theguardian .com/world/2017/nov/01/palestinians- ­crash-­banksy-­street-­party-­seeking-­apol ogy-­for-­balfour-­declaration. 111. Raphael Ahren, “Theresa May Vows to Mark Balfour Centennial ‘With Pride,’” Times of Israel, October 25, 2017, https://www.timesofisrael.com/theresa -­may-­vows-­to-­mark-­balfour-­centennial-­with-­pride/. 112. Daisy Wyatt, “Banksy West Bank Mural ‘Donkey Documents’ Expected to Sell for $700k at Auction,” Independent, July 29, 2015, http://www.independent .co.uk/arts- ­e ntertainment/art/news/banksy- ­w est-­b ank-­mural- ­donkey- ­docu ments-­expected-­to-­sell-­for-­700k-­at-­auction-­10425007.html. 113. Ronen Eidelman, “Separation Wall in Palestine,” Thamyris/Intersecting 21 (2010): 111. 114. Peter Beaumont, “Pope Francis Offers Prayers at Israeli Separation Wall in Bethlehem,” Guardian, May 25, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014 /may/25/pope-­francis-­israeli-­separation-­wall-­bethlehem. 115. In 2009 Pope Benedict XVI also visited Palestine, where he was supposed to give a televised address in a schoolyard. Residents of the Aida refugee camp, however, built a stage for the pope in front of the wall because, as Hamden Jewe’i stated, “that way the whole world could see our suffering,” as quoted in Adam G. Heffez, Words & Walls (New York: Create Space Publishing, 2013), 89–90.

chapter 4 1. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

Notes to Pages 135 – 137  : 251

2. Michael Mizell-­Nelson, “Not Since the Great Depression: The Documentary Impulse Post-­Katrina,” in Engagement in the Wake of Katrina, ed. Amy Koritz and George Sanchez (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 59–77. 3. Janell Ross, “Katrina May Be a Metaphor to Some, But It’s Still a Reality to New Orleans,” Washington Post, August 27, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost .com/national/katrina-­may-­be-­a-­metaphor-­to-­some-­but-­its-­still-­a-­reality-­to-­new -­orleans/2015/08/27/f53bfaa6-­4b69-­11e5-­902f-­39e9219e574b_story.html. 4. “Lower Ninth Ward Statistical Area,” Data Center, https://www.datacenter research.org/data-­resources/neighborhood-­data/district-­8/lower-­ninth-­ward/. 5. Linda Robertson, “How Shall We Remember New Orleans? Comparing News Coverage of Post-­Katrina New Orleans and the 2008 Midwest Floods,” in The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans, ed. Cedric Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 284. 6. Cedric Johnson, “Charming Accommodations, Progressive Urbanism Meets Privatization in Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation,” in The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans, ed. Cedric Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 202. 7. Cedric Johnson, introduction to The Neoliberal Deluge, xix. 8. “Bush Doesn’t Care about Black People,” YouTube video, 1:51, posted by Shockroc1, April 17, 2006, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIUzLpO1kxI. 9. Robertson, “How Shall We Remember New Orleans?” 274. 10. Anthony Oliver Smith, as quoted in Vincanne Adams, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 15; on this in India, see Annu Jalais, as quoted in Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 17. 11. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. 12. Ron Eyerman, Is This America? Katrina as Cultural Trauma (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 85. 13. Jordan Flaherty, “Disasters,” Left Turn, September 18, 2005, https://www .leftturn.org/disasters. 14. “Katrina Sweeps Away an American Dream,” Melbourne Age, September 4, 2005, https://www.theage.com.au/opinion/katrina-­sweeps-­away-­an-­american-­dr eam-­20050904-­ge0t8c.html. 15. Adriana Lopez, “D.O.A.: Detroit? Think Again. Motor City Has a Chance at New Life,” Forbes, July 23, 2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/adrianalopez/20 13/07/23/d- ­o -­a- ­detroit-­think-­again-­motor- ­city-­has-­a- ­chance-­at-­new-­life/#15429 1fd4b78. 16. Adams, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith, 4–5. 17. “‘Boost or Blight?’ Graffiti Writing and Street Art in the ‘New’ New Orleans,” in Routledge Handbook on Graffiti and Street Art, ed. Jeffrey Ian Ross (New York: Routledge, 2016), 234. 18. Derek Alderman and Heather Ward, “Writing on the Plywood: Toward an Analysis of Hurricane Graffiti,” Coastal Management 35, no. 1 (2008): 3.

252 : Notes to Pages 13 8 – 14 1

19. While art wash is a recognized term, I am specifically using it the way Rafael Schacter employs it in his article exploring “street art” and the “creative city.” See Schacter, “The Ugly Truth: Street Art, Graffiti and the Creative City,” Art & the Public Sphere 3, no. 2 (December 2014): 161–76. 20. William M. Taylor and Michael P. Levine, “Catastrophe and the Katrina Effect,” in The “Katrina Effect”: On the Nature of Catastrophe, ed. William M. Taylor, Michael P. Levine, Oenone Rooksby, and Joely-­Kym Sobott (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 1–24. 21. Robertson, “How Shall We Remember New Orleans?,” 273. 22. Lynnell L. Thomas, Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 14. 23. Ibid., 20. 24. Ibid., 19. 25. Ross, “Katrina May Be a Metaphor to Some.” 26. Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City, 11, as quoted in James Rhodes, “Extending the Urban Disaster Paradigm: From New Orleans to Detroit (and Beyond?),” in The “Katrina Effect”: On the Nature of Catastrophe, ed. William M. Taylor, Michael P. Levine, Oenone Rooksby, and Joely-­Kym Sobott (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 126. 27. Nixon, Slow Violence, 2. 28. Johnson, The Neoliberal Deluge, xxvi. 29. Eyerman, Is This America? 85. 30. Johnson, The Neoliberal Deluge, xxvi. 31. Rhodes, “Extending the ‘Urban Disaster’ Paradigm,” 130. 32. As quoted in Robertson, “How Shall We Remember New Orleans? Comparing News Coverage of Post-­Katrina New Orleans and the 2008 Midwest Flood,” in Johnson, The Neoliberal Deluge, 287. 33. Josh Dausey and Philip Rucker, “Rush Limbaugh Awarded Presidential Award of Freedom at State of the Union,” Washington Post, February 5, 2020, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ trump-­s ays-­h e-­p lans-­t o-­a ward -­presidential-­medal-­of-­freedom-­to-­rush-­limbaugh/2020/02/04/2d8f6a76-­47a7-­11 ea-­ab15-­b5df3261b710_story.html. 34. Robertson, “How Shall We Remember New Orleans?” 285–86. 35. As quoted in Adams, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith, 1. 36. Sharon Monteith, introduction to “Hurricane Katrina: Five Years After,” special issue, Journal of American Studies 44, no. 3 (August 2010): 481. 37. CNN Newscast, as quoted in Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin, 2010), 237. 38. Anna Hartnell, “New Orleans, 2005 and Port-­au-­Prince, 2010: Some Reflections on Trans-­American Disaster in the Twenty-­First Century,” in The “Katrina Effect”: On the Nature of Catastrophe, ed. William M. Taylor, Michael P. Levine, Oenone Rooksby, and Joely-­Kym Sobott (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 52. 39. As quoted in Robertson, “How Shall We Remember New Orleans?” 270. 40. Eyerman, Is This America?, 28.

Notes to Page s 14 1– 14 7  : 253

41. Chris Russel and Chad Lavin, “From Tipping Point to Meta-­Crisis,” in Johnson, The Neoliberal Deluge, 21. 42. Eyerman, Is This America?, 29, 42, 34. 43. Thomas, Desire and Disaster in New Orleans, 43, 14. 44. Lynnell L. Thomas, “‘Roots Run Deep Here’: The Construction of Black New Orleans in Post-­Katrina Tourism Narratives,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2009): 751. 45. Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 1–11. 46. James Johnson, “Aggregates Unseen: Imagining Post-­Katrina New Orleans,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 3 (2012): 664. Even this categorical information was not uniform in the chaotic days following the storm, as different agencies descended on the city and used different methods to report victims and survivors of the storm. 47. Joby Bass, “Photographic Journal Culture in Nature: Reclaiming Place after Katrina,” Focus on Geography 48, no. 4 (Spring 2006): 6. 48. For an excellent examination of New Orleans graffiti post-­Katrina, see Doreen Piano, “Boost of Blight? Graffiti Writing and Street Art in the ‘New’ New Orleans,” in Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art, ed. Jeffrey Ian Ross (New York: Routledge, 2016), 234–47. 49. Mizell-­Nelson, “Not since the Great Depression,” 4. 50. Doug MacCash, “Katrina Tattoos 10 Years After: Show Your Memory Marks,” New Orleans Times-­Picayune, June 9, 2015, https://www.nola.com/entertainment _life/arts/article_06983369-­b48d-­5210-­9293-­d611115f82cd.html. 51. Gendering storms—and the misogynistic responses to them—is part of the framing of hurricanes and has a life-­and-­death effect: storms that have female names are deadlier perhaps because people do not take these storms as seriously. See Kris Macomber, Christine Mallinson, and Elizabeth Seale, “ ‘Katrina That Bitch!’ Hegemonic Representations of Women’s Sexuality on Hurricane Katrina Souvenir T-Shirts,” Journal of Popular Studies 44, no. 3 (2011): 525–44; Kiju Jung et al., “Female Hurricanes Are Deadlier than Male Hurricanes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 24 (2014): 8782–87. 52. Chris Rose, One Dead in Attic: After Katrina (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 33. 53. Spike Lee, dir., When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (New York: HBO, 2006). 54. Alderman and Ward, “Writing on the Plywood,” 1–2. 55. Doreen Piano is one of the few scholars who acknowledged and wrote about the robust graffiti scene in New Orleans and photographed much of the graffiti right after the storm. See Piano, “‘Boost or Blight?,’” 234. 56. Personal interview with Billy, New Orleans, July 2016. 57. Ibid. 58. Doug MacCash, “Artist Skylar Fein’s New Exhibit Opens at the New Orleans

254 : Notes to Page s 14 7 – 150

Museum of Art,” NOLA.com, September 10, 2009, https://www.nola.com/enter tainment_life/arts/article_3847ac03-­7bb8-­5c31-­b4e1-­452ad38a01cc.html. 59. The Black working-­class neighborhood was disrupted when the I-­10 Claiborne expressway cut through it. The Circle Food Store survived and thrived. However, with the massive flooding of the store and the gentrification of the area, Circle Food Store was bought at a sheriff ’s auction by businessman Sidney Torres for $1.7 million on April 25, 2019. The plan is to make an upscale food hall. Jeff Adelson, “Here’s What Sidney Torres Has in Mind for the Historic Circle Food Store He Now Owns,” NOLA.com, April 25, 2019, https://www.theadvocate.com /new_orleans/news/business/article_0a93d178-­677f-­11e9-­9108-­67eb0db72931 .html. 60. Personal interview with Skylar Fein, New Orleans, 2016. 61. Doug MacCash, “Artist Skylar Fein’s New Exhibit.” 62. Robert Polidor, After the Flood (Gottingen, Germany: Steidl, 2006), 1. 63. Michael Kimmelman, “What’s Wrong with This Picture?” New York Times, September 22, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/arts/design/22floo .html. 64. In one shot of an overpass in After the Flood, for example, there is what looks like the work of the Gray Ghost, a slab of gray covering over graffiti. But there is hardly any graffiti throughout the book. 65. This feeling of an ending is present despite the fact that Polidori concludes the book with images of trailers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In fact, the way these images are curated, the feel of ruin is even more apparent. In the beginning of the book, there is a fifteen-­page section of numerous small four-­inch-­by-­four-­inch images of the outside of destroyed homes. In a parallel scene toward the end of the book, there is another four-­inch-­by-­four-­inch layout sequence of FEMA trailers; this time there are only two pages for a total of thirty-­two trailers. The subtext is clear—where are all the other people whose homes were destroyed on the previous fifteen pages? While there might be some rebuilding, there is no rebirth. 66. Michael P. Levine, “Witnessing Katrina: Morbid Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Disaster,” in The “Katrina Effect”: On the Nature of Catastrophe, ed. William M. Taylor, Michael P. Levine, Oenone Rooksby, and Joely-­Kym Sobott (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 155, 158. 67. In Destroy This Memory, there is also a focus on the animals left behind. Numerous pages have the official responses of the New Orleans Society for the Prevention of Cruelty for Animals, members of which spray-­painted their often grisly finds when searching for animals. In the book, there is a photo of a spray-­ painted accusation, “Starved dog to death,” with an arrow pointing to a door of a split home. In the chaos of the storm, what this graffiti shows is the anger, confusion, and accusations of a population dealing with a tremendous event that has upended their lives. 68. “Bush Returns to New Orleans, Denies Prejudice in Recovery Effort,” CBS News, September 12, 2005, https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/bush-­returns-­to-­new -­orleans-­denies-­prejudice-­in-­recovery-­effort-­1.567237.

Notes to Pages 150 – 156  : 255

69. Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 37. 70. Alderman and Ward, “Writing on the Plywood,” 9. 71. Dan Streible, “Media Artists, Local Activists and Outsider Archivists: The Case of Helen Hill,” in Old and New Media After Katrina, by Diane Negra (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 157. 72. Avigdor Klingman, Ronit Shalev, and Abigail Pearlman, “Graffiti: A Creative Means of Youth Coping with Collective Trauma,” The Arts in Psychotherapy 27, no. 5 (December 2000): 299–307, as quoted in Alderman and Ward, “Writing on the Plywood,” 15. 73. “Public Service through Art in New Orleans,” Medium, May 24, 2016, https:// medium.com/@vetscominghome/public-­service-­through-­art-­in-­new- ­orleans- ­d5 ddb03b1374. 74. Nicole Rupersburg, “Brandan ‘Bmike’ Odums,” High Ground News, November 22, 2016, http://www.highgroundnews.com/features/brandanbmikeodums .aspx. 75. Ibid. One of the most viewed of 2-­Cent’s productions was the song “Some Type of A,” featuring Rick Ross and Rich Homie Quan rapping about the importance of reading. “‘Some Type of A’ Featuring Rick Ross and Rich Homie Quan,” YouTube video, 3:39, posted by 2-­Cent TV, October 22, 2013, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=ok_spwsWH7g. 76. Skylar Fein, “Inside Project Be,” Nola Defender, September 2, 2013, https:// www.noladefender.com/2013/09/02/uncategorized/inside-­project-­be/. 77. Craig Magraff Jr., “2-­Cents Worth,” Where Y’at, November 25, 2013, https:// www.whereyat.com/2-­cents-­worth. 78. Doug MacCash, “Allow the Public to Visit Brandan Odums’ ‘Project Be’ Graffiti Masterpiece,” NOLA.com, September 11, 2013, http://www.nola.com/arts /index.ssf/ 2013/09/allow_the_ public_to_visit_bran_1.html. 79. Fein, “Inside Project Be.” 80. anthonyturducken, George Washington Carver High, August 7, 2010, photograph, https://www.flickr.com/photos/37338074@N00/4879997210/. 81. Fein, “Inside Project Be.” 82. The Black Panthers, “The Black Panthers: Ten Point Program,” Collective Liberation, https://collectiveliberation.org/wp- ­content/uploads/2015/01/BPP_ Ten_Point_Program.pdf. 83. Personal interview with Brandan Odums, New Orleans, 2016. 84. Fein, “Inside Project Be.” 85. Doug MacCash, “Brandan Odums’ Graffiti Masterpiece Celebrates Civil Rights Heroes,” New Orleans Times-­Picayune, September 7, 2013, https://www .nola.com/arts/2013/09/project_be_brandan_odums_graff.html. 86. Personal interview with Brandan Odums. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid.

256 : Notes to Pages 157 – 163

91. Ibid. 92. Ashley Rousen, “Curtain Closes on Exhibit Be,” Nola Defender, January 10, 2015, https://www.noladefender.com/2015/01/20/uncategorized/curtain- ­closes -­on-­exhibit-­be/. 93. Personal interview with Brandan Odums. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid. 98. Christian Moises, “Reinventing the Crescent: Riverfront Redevelopment Small Scale So Far,” New Orleans City Business, February 6, 2013, https://newor leanscitybusiness.com/blog/2013/02/06/riverfront-­redevelopment-­small-­scale -­so-­far/. 99. Reinventing the Crescent: New Orleans Riverfront Development Plan, https:// www.eskewdumezripple.com/reinventing-­the- ­crescent-­new- ­orleans-­riverfront -­development-­plan.html. 100. Matt Sakakeeny writes about this conflict of interest as well as Sean Cummings’s connection to gentrification and New Orleans in their article, “Living in a Laboratory: New Orleans Today,” Books & Ideas, September 10, 2015, https:// booksandideas.net/Living-­in-­a-­Laboratory-­New-­Orleans-­Today.html. 101. Mimi Read, “Where the Walls Do Talk,” New York Times, June 6, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/greathomesanddestinations/in-­n ew -­orleans-­a-­building-­where-­the-­graffiti-­takes-­center-­stage.html. 102. Nadja Brandt, “New Orleans Rolling in Cash Sees Rebirth: Real Estate,” Bloomberg, August 27, 2013, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-­08 -­27/new-­orleans-­rolling-­in-­cash-­sees-­rebirth-­real-­estate; Oscar Raymundo, “New Orleans Rebuilds as a ‘Boutique City,’ ” BBC Travel: The Passport Blog, February 11, 2013, http://www.bbc.com/travel/blog/20130207-­new- ­orleans-­rebuilds-­as-­a -­boutique-­city. 103. Personal interview with Cummings in his hotel lobby. 104. Megan French-­Marcelin, “Gentrification’s Ground Zero,” Jacobin, August 28, 2015, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/Katrina-­New-­Orleans-­Arne-­Dun can-­Charters/. 105. French-­Marcelin, “Gentrification’s Ground Zero.” 106. Personal interview with Brandan Odums. 107. Sakakeeny, “Living in a Laboratory: New Orleans Today,” Books and Ideas, September 10, 2015, http://www.booksandideas.net/IMG/pdf/20150910_new_or leans.pdf. 108. Personal interview with Skylar Fein. 109. See the website of the St. Roch Market at https://www.neworleans.stroch market.com/. 110. Jaquetta White, “Vandalization of New St. Roch Market Reflects Community’s Dissatisfaction, Disappointment in Finished Product, Residents Say,” New Orleans Advocate, May 2, 2015, http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news /article_7510c345-­484a-­5637-­a93b-­ff696712b6a6.html.

Notes to Page s 163 – 170  : 257

111. Personal interview with Skylar Fein. 112. Ibid. 113. Doug MacCash, “Art Critic Doug MacCash Weighs in on the Best of 2009,” Times-­Picayune, December 29, 2009, https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life /arts/article_eb3d863d-­36a7-­518b-­82d4-­e4cb32f90f5 f.html. 114. Doug MacCash, “Graffiti Writer Turned Legitimate Muralist Frustrated by Gray Overpainting,” New Orleans Times-­Picayune, October 5, 2011, https://www.nola .com/entertainment_life/arts/article_9b9784ca- ­c170-­53ed-­ac83-­f16e50dc4b46 .html#:~:text=A%20spray%2Dpainting%20muralist%20named,out%20by%20pale %20gray%20paint. 115. As quoted in Renia Ehrenfeucht, “Art, Public Spaces, and Private Property along the Streets of New Orleans,” Urban Geography 35, no. 7 (2014): 973. 116. Skylar Fein, “Why We Write,” Skylar Fein (tumblr blog), 2011, http://skylar fein.tumblr.com/post/1565815784. 117. Kurt Iveson, “Introduction: Graffiti, Street Art and the City,” City 14, no. 1 (2010): 25–32. 118. Fein, “Why We Write.” 119. Ibid. 120. Personal interview with Skylar Fein. 121. Personal interview with Billy. 122. Ray Nagin, “Ray Nagin: ‘This City Will Be Chocolate at the End of the Day’ Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—2006” (speech given at Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration, City Hall, New Orleans, January 17, 2006), https://speakola.com /political/ray-­nagin-­chocolate-­city-­2006. 123. Rob Walker, “Airbnb Pits Neighbor against Neighbor in Tourist-­Friendly New Orleans,” New York Times, March 5, 2016, https://preservemontereyneighborhoods .community/wp- ­content/uploads/2017/12/airbnb-­pits-­neighbor-­against-­neigh bor-­in-­tourist-­friendly-­new-­orleans-­the-­new-­york-­times.pdf; John Levendis and Mehmet F. Dicle, “The Neighborhood Impact of Airbnb on New Orleans,” SSRN, October 20, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2856771. 124. Peter Moskowitz, “Destroy and Rebuild: A Q&A with One of New Orleans’ Biggest Developers,” Gawker True Stories, February 16, 2015, http://truestories.gaw ker.com/destroy-­and-­rebuild-­a-­q-­a-­with-­one-­of-­new-­orleans-­bigg-­1684973590.

chapter 5 1. Kate Linebaugh, “Rising from the Ashes: The Origins of Detroit’s Motto,” Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2013, https://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-­intelligence /2013/07/19/rising-­from-­the-­ashes-­the-­origins-­of-­detroits-­motto/. 2. Jeremy Williams, Detroit: The Black Bottom Community (New York: Arcadia Publishing, 2009), 1–10. I want to thank Scott Hocking, the Detroit-­based artist who, in an over two-­hour interview with me about graffiti, Detroit, and ruins, brought to my attention the history of the Black Bottom neighborhood. 3. Jerry Herron, “Detroit: Disaster Deferred, Disaster in Progress,” Southern Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 665, 668.

258 : Notes to Pages 170 – 174

4. Scott Kurashige, Fifty Year Rebellion (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 50, 41–42. 5. Ibid., 39. 6. Anna Bressanin, “How Gentrification Transformed a Brooklyn Neighborhood,” BBC News video, February 1, 2012, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/maga zine-­16827855/how-­gentrification-­transformed-­a-­brooklyn-­neighbourhood. 7. John Lennon, “‘Bombing’ Brooklyn: Graffiti, Language and Gentrification,” Rhizomes no. 19 (Summer 2009), http://www.rhizomes.net/issue19/lennon/. 8. Detroit Historical Society, “Eastern Market Historic District,” Encyclopedia of Detroit, 2019, https://detroithistorical.org/learn/encyclopedia-­of-­detroit/eastern -­market-­historic-­district. 9. “What Is One Time Run?” 1xRun.com, 2019, https://www.1xrun.com/about/. 10. See Murals in the Marketplace website for details, at https://www.murals inthemarket.com/. Siobhan Gregory, “Authenticity and Luxury Branding in a Renewing Detroit Landscape,” Journal of Cultural Geography 36, no. 2 (2019): 149–51. 11. Kimberly Hayes Taylor, “Graffiti for Good: How Muralists and Businesses Are Joining Forces to Enliven Detroit,” Model D, September 18, 2017, http://www .modeldmedia.com/features/graffiti-­for-­good-­091817.aspx. 12. Hayes Taylor, “Graffiti for Good.” 13. “Red Bull House of Art,” Red Bull Arts, 2018, http://www.redbullhouseofart .com. There has been resistance to the gentrification of Eastern Market, with artists protesting in various ways the transformation of the neighborhood. See Ryan Patrick Hooper, “Eastern Market’s Supino, Russell Street Hit with ‘Gentrification in Progress’ Protest Art,” May 18, 2019, Detroit Free Press, https://www.freep.com /story/entertainment/arts/2019/05/18/eastern-­market-­gentrification-­detroit-­pro test-­art/3720207002/. 14. “Quicken Loans Supports Artists and Entrepreneurs in Detroit Neighborhoods with Small Business Murals Project,” Quicken Loans Press Room, May 17, 2017, https://www.quickenloans.com/press-­room/2017/05/17/quicken-­loans-­sup ports-­a rtists- ­e ntrepreneurs- ­detroit-­n eighborhoods-­s mall-­b usiness-­murals -­project/. 15. Lutz Henke, “Why We Painted Over Berlin’s Most Famous Graffiti.” The Guardian, December 19, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec /19/why-­we-­painted-­over-­berlin-­graffiti-­kreuzberg-­murals. 16. Marco Siwi, “Pixação: The Story behind São Paulo’s ‘Angry’ Alternative to Graffiti,” Guardian, January 6, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jan /06/pixação-­the-­story-­behind-­São-­paulos-­angry-­alternative-­to- ­graffiti. Although pixadores are often seen as hypermasculine, there are numerous female writers. For an excellent exploration of pixadores from a feminist perspective, see Jessica Nydia Pabón-­Colón’s discussion of Rede Nami, a feminist graffiti collective in Brazil, in Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 77–88. 17. Paula Larruscahim and Paul Schweizer, “Difference upon the Walls: Hygienizing Policies and the Use of Graffiti against Pixação in São Paulo,” in Murals and

Notes to Pages 175 – 177  : 259

Tourism: Heritage, Politics and Identity, ed. Jonathan Skinner and Lee Jolliffe (London: Routledge, 2017), 128. 18. Larruscahim and Schweizer, “Difference upon the Walls,” 137. 19. Roger Gastman and Caleb Neelon, The History of American Graffiti (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 30. 20. Larruscahim and Schweizer, “Difference upon the Walls,” 139. 21. There are many examples of the way Brazil, in the second decade of the twenty-­first century, has been embracing right-­wing, neoliberal policies. For a specific example, see “Brazil Bus Strike Sparks São Paulo Chaos,” Al Jazeera, May 21, 2014, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2014/05/brazil-­bus-­strike-­spa rks-­São-­paulo-­chaos-­20145219519323146.html. For an overview of this shift in Brazilian politics, see Ruy Braga and Sean Purdy, “A Precarious Hegemony: Neo-­ liberalism, Social Struggles, and the End of Lulismo in Brazil,” Globalizations 16, no. 2 (2019): 201–15. 22. Marcia Tiburi, “Visual Right to the City: The Aesthetics of Pixação and the Case of São Paulo,” Philosophy Pop (2011): 39. 23. Ibid., 39, 42. 24. Even as São Paulo attempts to eliminate pixação by embracing graffiti, the divide between what is legal and not legal becomes somewhat blurred. In 2017, João Doria, the center-­right mayor of São Paulo, created the Cidade Linda (beautiful city) program, whitewashing street art created by some of the city’s most renowned artists and thereby becoming the arbiter of what could be considered vandalism and what should be art. Who is allowed to paint, and on which walls, is not always clearly defined. Lawsuits were filed against the mayor to stop his whitewashing campaign. Shannon Sims, “Paint It Grey: The Controversial Plan to ‘Beautify’ São Paulo,” February 23, 2017, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian .com/cities/2017/feb/23/sao-­paulo-­street-­art-­paint-­over-­joao-­doria-­brazil-­graffiti. 25. Cornbread (Darryl McCray) is a legend in the graffiti world. For an overview of his history, see the documentary Cry of the City Part 1: The Legend of Cornbread, directed by Sean McKnight (Cinema Alliance, Community Films, 2007). 26. In the public relations material of the program’s history published on its website, there is a photo of five individuals in white shirts and blue jeans using beige paint to cover over a graffitied wall on Broad and Spring Streets. There is an older Black man with white hair, a teenage white girl with blonde hair, and a Black boy with braided hair all joining together in this endeavor to “clean up” their city. The photo obviously represents generational as well as racial agreement that graffiti needs to be erased and replaced on the wall by “art.” For the Mural Arts Advocates, murals do not interact with graffiti, they cover it. The voices illegally writing on the wall are replaced by “artists” who have permission (and who need approval for their content) to place their work on the wall. Mural Arts, “History,” https:// www.muralarts.org/history/. 27. Alesia Montgomery, “Reappearance of the Public: Placemaking, Minoritization and Resistance in Detroit,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40, no. 4 (2016): 776.

260 : Notes to Pages 177 – 18 0

28. Ibid. 29. Jamie Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 4 (2005): 763–64. 30. Rafael Schachter, Art & the Public Sphere 3, no. 2 (December 2014): 167–68. 31. Camila Alvarez and Natalie Edgar, dirs., Right to Wynwood (Meraki Media, 2011). 32. Lombardi refutes his appearance in his discussion with WLRN Public Radio a few years after Right to Wynwood aired. “David Lombardi Responds to Gentrification Criticism, Talks about Waiting Out Wynwood Development,” YouTube video, 3:25, posted by WLRN Public Radio and Television, January 15, 2015, https:// youtu.be/_72TgpWR4YU. 33. Schachter, Art & the Public Sphere, 167–68. 34. There are many articles on Wynwood’s social and economic transformation. For a detailed discussion of the way this neighborhood has become gentrified (and the resistance to it), see Marcos Feldman’s “The Role of Neighborhood Organizations in the Production of Gentrifiable Urban Space: The Case of Wynwood, Miami’s Puerto Rican Barrio” (PhD diss., Florida International University, 2011), https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/540. 35. Corey Williams, “The Demographics of Detroit Are Changing Rapidly,” May 21, 2015, Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/the- ­demographics -­of-­detroit-­are-­changing-­rapidly-­2015-­5. 36. Robert Klara, “How Shinola Went from Shoe Polish to the Coolest Brand in America,” Adweek, June 22, 2015, http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising -­branding/how-­shinola-­went-­shoe-­polish-­coolest-­brand-­america-­165459. 37. Stacy Perman, “The Real History of America’s Most Authentic Fake Brand,” Inc., April 2016, https://www.inc.com/magazine/201604/stacy-­perman/shinola -­watch-­history-­manufacturing-­heritage-­brand.html. 38. Julia Hinds, “Shinola Watches Are ‘Saving Detroit,’ Oscar Winner Says in Speech,” Detroit Free Press, February 24, 2019, https://www.freep.com/story/enter tainment/movies/julie-­hinds/2019/02/24/shinola-­w atches- ­detroit- ­oscars-­far relly-­academy/2976505002/. To have Shinola watches “made in Detroit,” the company’s owner Tom Kartosis received a $125 million investment from “friends and family,” including Dan Gilbert. 39. Tim Alberta, “Is Dan Gilbert Detroit’s New Superhero?” The Atlantic, February 27, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/is-­ dan -­gilbert-­detroits-­new-­superhero/425742/. 40. Mark Jay and Philip Conklin, “Detroit and the Political Origins of ‘Broken Windows’ Policing,” Race & Class 59, no. 2 (October 2017): 26–28. 41. Reif Larsen, “Detroit: The Most Exciting City in America?” New York Times, November 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/travel/detroit -­michigan-­downtown.html. 42. Philip Conklin and Mark Jay, “Opportunity Detroit,” Jacobin, January 3, 2018, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/detroit-­revival-­inequality-­dan-­gilbert-­hud sons. 43. Larsen, “Detroit.”

Notes to Pages 18 0 – 188  : 261

44. Conklin and Jay, “Opportunity Detroit.” 45. Detroit Future City, “Detroit Future City Strategic Framework,” 2019, https:// detroitfuturecity.com/strategic-­framework/. 46. John Gallagher, “Gilbert Dismisses Criticism of 500-­Camera Security System,” August 16, 2015, Detroit Free Press, https://www.freep.com/story/money /business/michigan/2015/08/15/gilbert-­security- ­quicken- ­detroit- ­downtown-­pri vacy/31635245/. 47. Detroit Museum of Public Art, “The Detroit Mural Project,” http://detroit mopa.org. 48. “Stroh’s Releases New Brew to Michigan—Perseverance IPA,” PR Newswire, May 3, 2018, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-­releases/strohs-­releases-­new -­brew-­to-­michigan--­perseverance-­ipa-­300641922.html; Detroit Museum of Public Art, “The Detroit Mural Project.” 49. Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, “Dequindre Cut,” 2019, http://detroitriver front.org/riverfront/dequindre-­cut/dequindre-­cut. 50. Rebecca Kavanagh, “Your Guide to Detroit’s Street Art,” Visit Detroit, March 20, 2017, https://visitdetroit.com/detroit-­street-­art/. 51. Louis Aguilar, “Putting a Price Tag on Properties Linked to Gilbert,” Detroit News, April 28, 2016, https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/2016/04/28 /dan-­gilbert-­bedrock-­downtown-­detroit-­buildings/83681698/. 52. Robert Allen, “Why Detroit Targeted Famed Graffiti Artist Shepard Fairey,” Detroit Free Press, July 14, 2015, https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michi gan/detroit/ 2015/ 07/14/artist-­shepard-­fairey-­turn-­today/30118623/. 53. Jim Schaefer, “Judge Tosses Case against Street Artist Shepard Fairey; City to Appeal,” Detroit Free Press, June 29, 2016, https://www.freep.com/story /news/local/michigan/detroit/2016/06/29/judge-­tosses- ­case-­against-­street-­art ist-­shepard-­fairey-­city-­appeal/86523206/. 54. Jori Finkel, “After ‘Hope,’ and Lawsuit, Shepard Fairey Tries Damage Control,” New York Times, November 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03 /arts/design/shepard-­fairey-­damaged-­chinatown.html. 55. Allen, “Why Detroit Targeted Famed Graffiti Artist Shepard Fairey.” 56. Ryan Patrick Hooper, “The Grand River Creative Corridor Showcases the Art of Transformation,” Hour Detroit, August 31, 2013, https://www.hourdetroit.com /community/the-­art-­of-­transformation/. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Sintex, “About,” http://www.sintexart.com/about.html. Personal interview with Sintex, Detroit, June 2016. 61. Hooper, “The Art of Transformation”; Hayley, “Grand River Creative Corridor,” Awesome Mitten (blog), February 14, 2013, https://www.awesomemitten.com /grand-­river-­creative-­corridor/. 62. Lee DeVito, “While Artist Sintex Fights ‘Culture Vultures,’ Detroit Gears Up for a Graffiti Crackdown,” February 4, 2014, Metro Times, https://www.metrotimes .com/detroit/while-­artist-­sintex-­fights- ­culture-­vultures- ­detroit-­gears-­up-­for-­a

262 : Notes to Pages 188 – 191

-­graffiti-­crackdown/Content?oid=2297092; Steve Neavling, “Graffiti ‘War’ between Sintex, Out-­of-­Towners Turns Ugly in Detroit” November, 24, 2014, Motor City Muckraker, http://motorcitymuckraker.com/2014/11/24/graffiti-­war-­between-­sin tex-­out-­of-­towners-­turns-­ugly-­in-­detroit/; Gus Burns, “Detroit’s Sintex Paints Over Gaia Mural, Calls Grand River Creative Corridor ‘Culture Vultures,’ ” August 22, 2014, M Live, https://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/2014/08/detroit_graffiti_artist _sparks.html. 63. Grand River Creative Corridor-­Detroit, “Official Statement: Defacing of Vincent Chin Mural,” Facebook, edited August 19, 2014, https://www.facebook .com/GRCCDETROIT/photos/a.121046951373103.30480.100439420100523 /503701233107671/. 64. Eric Lacy, “Rick Ross’ Detroit Death Threat Tied to Trick Trick’s ‘No Fly Zone,’ Local Rapper’s Manager Confirms,” June 23, 2014, M Live, https://www .mlive.com/entertainment/detroit/2014/06/post_113.html. 65. Personal interview with Sydney James, Detroit, June 2016. 66. Revok, after all, was part of the Detroit Beautification Project that brought together more than twenty international graffiti writers and was funded by Montana Cans, the Seventh Letter, 1XRun, and Contra Projects, among others. The project had a highly effective social media campaign, and a few short films were made to advertise it. In one of the videos, the artists are explaining that they wanted to brighten up Detroit with their images and, although some community members did not like the artwork (including one citizen who went to a city council meeting to complain about a particular image featuring a casket), the video consistently shows the artists painting with kids around them, illustrating the positive value of “beautifying” a neighborhood. Katie Rucke, “A Photographic Look at How Graffiti Is Healing Detroit,” Mint Press News, January 27, 2014, https://www .mintpressnews.com/graffiti-­art-­work-­in-­bankrupt-­detroit/177917/; “The Detroit Beautification Project. Chapter 1,” Vimeo video, 10:​11, posted by “TheSeventh‑ Letter,” June 25, 2012, https://vimeo.com/44699407. 67. Derek Weaver, LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekjweaver/. 68. Steve Neavling, “Oh the irony! Non-­profit displaces artists in Detroit to fight gentrification,” Metro Times, June 18, 2019, https://www.metrotimes.com/news -­hits/archives/2019/06/18/oh-­the-­irony-­nonprofit- ­displaces-­artists-­in- ­detroit-­to -­fight-­gentrification. 69. John Beardsley et al., Connecting the Dots: Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 72. 70. Ibid., 14. 71. Jerry Herron, AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 199. 72. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 73. Ibid. 74. Kristeva’s psychoanalytical theories (simplistically restated here) posit that the power of horror is that it brings us face-­to-­face with the materiality of death;

Notes to Pages 192 – 2 02  : 263

vomiting can elicit an abject response that is beyond words and instead brings one to a pre-­lingual state that traumatically indicates one’s own death. 75. Beardsley et al., Connecting the Dots, vii. 76. Kurt Nagl, “Whitfield Promoted to CEO to Lead New Vision of Heidelberg Project,” March 1, 2015, Crain’s Detroit Business, http://www.crainsdetroit.com /article/20170301/NEWS/170309989/whitfield-­promoted-­to-­ceo-­to-­lead-­new-­visi on-­of-­heidelberg-­project. 77. U.S. Boundary, “Demographic, Population, Households, and Housing Units,” http://www.usboundary.com/Areas/Census%20Tract/Michigan/Wayne%20Cou nty/Census%20Tract%205163/464328#Data. 78. Beardsley et al., Connecting the Dots, 51. 79. Ibid., 52, 57. 80. M. H. Millier, “Tyree Guyton Turned a Detroit Street into a Museum. Why Is He Taking It Down?” March 9, 2019, New York Times Magazine, https://www.ny times.com/2019/05/09/magazine/tyree-­guyton-­art-­detroit.html. 81. Adam Nossiter, “Outlines Emerge for a Shaken New Orleans,” New York Times, August 27, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/us/nationalspecial /27orleans.html. 82. Matt Bell, Scrapper (New York: Soho Books, 2015). 83. Of course, as tourists roam through the neighborhood, quickly getting out of cars to snap photos before getting back into those cars, one wonders whether this is actually a “meeting” among folks from different socioeconomic and racial classes. 84. Beardsley et al., Connecting the Dots. 85. Despite more acceptance by state officials and a growing international reputation (Guyton and Whitfield have traveled to give lectures in a number of countries), from 2013 to 2014, more than ten fires were started by unknown arsonists, who burned down many of the iconic buildings. Still the project continues. 86. Millier, “Tyree Guyton Turned a Detroit Street into a Museum.” 87. Nagl, “Whitfield Promoted to CEO.” 88. Ibid. 89. Millier, “Tyree Guyton Turned a Detroit Street into a Museum.” 90. Isobar, https://www.isobar.com/us/en/. 91. Personal interview with Daryll, Baton Rouge, LA, July 2016. 92. “Lincoln Theater Gets a Face Lift,” Pose II, August 23, 2013, https://posetwo .com/igetaround/painting/2013/08/lincoln-­theater-­gets-­a-­face-­lift/. 93. Personal interview with Kevin Harris, Baton Rouge, LA, July 2016. 94. Rahmaan Statik Barnes, “The Mission Statement and Biography of Rahmaan Statik Barnes,” StatikOne.net, 2019, http://www.statikone.net/ARTIST_MIS SION.html. 95. Lottie L. Joiner, “Baton Rouge Bus Boycott Paved Way for King’s Montgomery Effort,” Crisis, 110, no. 4 ( July 2003): 7. 96. Inae Oh, “Trump Defends Claim That There Were ‘Very Fine People on Both Sides’ of White Supremacist Rally,” Mother Jones, April 26, 2019, https://www

264 : Note s to Pages 2 02 – 210

.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/trump- ­defends- ­claim-­that-­there-­were-­very -­fine-­people-­on-­both-­sides-­of-­white-­supremacist-­rally/. 97. Personal interview with Kevin Harris. 98. “Mural House Project,” Kickstarter, November 3, 2014, https://www.kick starter.com/projects/653024690/mural-­house-­project?ref=nav_search&result =project&term =mural% 20house%20project. Harris discussed how after the museum received favorable press locally, the Baton Rouge Arts Council took pictures of some of the murals and claimed partial responsibility in grant funding opportunities. Harris resisted and attempted to get the council to cease and desist using the museum’s images: “It got to the point that I had to fight with people just to create art, to produce it.” Personal interview with Kevin Harris. 99. Personal interview with Kevin Harris. 100. “Hometown (r)Evolution: Casey Phillips at TEDxLSU,” YouTube video, 16:​ 16, posted by TEDx Talks, May 3, 2013, https://youtu.be/eNIkFhH437s. 101. The Walls Project, “Create, Cultivate, Reactivate,” http://www.thewallsproj ect.org/img/pdf/CaseforSupport%20(1).pdf, 5. 102. The Walls Project, “Wall Project Murals,” http://www.thewallsproject.org /programs/murals/7/#murals-­index. 103. Noureddine Miladi, “Urban Graffiti, Political Activism and Resistance,” in The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism, ed. Graham Meikle (New York: Routledge, 2018), 243–44. 104. Williams did not delve into the financial particulars of why the Walls Project is painting a large harmonica on a private business, but she stated that the art is an advertisement for tourists, highlighting that Baton Rouge is open for business. This towering mural on the parking garage is meant to persuade the New Orleans tourist trade that Baton Rouge also has its own musical community and culture. 105. “Mural of Alton Sterling at the Triple S Food Mart in North Baton Rouge,” Wikimedia, January 8, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Alton _Sterling#/media/File:Mural_of_Alton_Sterling_at_the_Triple_S_Food_Mart_in _North_Baton_Rouge.jpg.

conclusion 1. To find out more about the Fight for 15 campaign, see https://fightfor15.org. 2. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Data suggest an overrepresentation of Blacks among hospitalized patients.” See the CDC’s web page “COVID-­19 in Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups,” at https://www.cdc.gov /coronavirus/2019-­ncov/need-­extra-­precautions/racial-­ethnic-­minorities.html. 3. Angela Mitropoulos, “Against Quarantine,” New Inquiry, February 13, 2020, https://thenewinquiry.com/against-­quarantine/. 4. Michele Lancione and AbdouMaliq Simone, “Bio-­Austerity and Solidarity in the COVID-­19 Space of Emergency—Episode One,” Society and Space, March 19, 2020. 5. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 210 – 216  : 265

6. Shannon Bond, “Apple and Google Build Smartphone Tool to Track COVID­19,” NPR, April 10, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-­live-­updates /2020/04/10/831912284/apple-­and- ­google-­build-­smartphone-­tool-­to-­track- ­co vid-­19; Kelly Servick, “Cellphone Tracking Could Help Stem the Spread of Coronavirus: Is Privacy the Price?” Science, March 22, 2020, https://www.sciencemag.org /news/2020/03/cellphone-­tracking- ­could-­help-­stem-­spread- ­coronavirus-­privacy -­price; Mitropoulos, “Against Quarantine.” 7. For a discussion of how these technologies are beginning to take root in education, see Zeynep Tufekci, “The Pandemic Is No Excuse to Surveil Students,” The Atlantic, September 4, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive /2020/09/pandemic-­no-­excuse-­colleges-­surveil-­students/616015/. 8. Jennifer Billock, “How Street Artists around the World Are Reacting to COVID-­19,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 23, 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag .com/travel/how-­street-­artists-­round-­world-­are-­reacting-­to-­life-­w ith- ­covid-­19 -­180974712/. 9. Emily (@Emily_Lykos), “[Naples, Italy],” March 13, 2020, https://twitter.com /Emily_Lykos/status/1238357068471586816/photo/1. 10. “COVID-­19 Infection Tracking in NYC Jails,” Legal Aid Society, https:// legalaidnyc.org/covid-­19-­infection-­tracking-­in-­nyc-­jails/. 11. Claire Galloway, “ ‘Make the Rich Pay’: Story behind Strange Graffiti Appearing in Edinburgh amid Coronavirus Outbreak,” April 3, 2020, https://www .edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-­n ews/make-­r ich-­p ay-­s tory-­b ehind -­1 8037860?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign =sharebar. 12. Julie Tulke, “‘Solidarity Doesn’t Go into Quarantine:’ One Month of Political Interventions from the Athens Lockdown,” Aesthetics of a Crisis, April 20, 2020, http://aestheticsofcrisis.org. 13. Evan Hill and Ainara Tiefenthäler, “How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody,” New York Times, May 31, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31 floyd-­ investigation.html; “George Floyd: What Happened in the /us/george-­ Final Moments,” BBC News, July 16, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-­us -­canada-­52861726. 14. James Glanz and Campbell Robertson, “Lockdown Delays Cost At Least 36,000 Lives, Data Shows,” New York Times, May 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes .com/2020/05/20/us/coronavirus-­distancing-­deaths.html; Katie Rogers, “Protestors Dispersed with Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church,” New York Times, June 1, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/us/politics/trump-­st-­johns -­church-­bible.html. 15. Andrea Benjamin, Ray Block Jr., Jared Clemons, Chryl Laird, and Julian Wamble, “Set in Stone? Predicting Confederate Monument Removal,” PS: Political Science & Politics 53, no. 2 (2020): 237–42. 16. Harley Tamplin, “Austin Officers Take a Knee in Solidarity with Protestors against Police Brutality,” KXAN, June 6, 2020, https://www.kxan.com/austin - ­g eorge-­f loyd-­m ike-­r amos-­protests/austin-­p olice-­t o-­k neel-­f or-­8 -­m inutes-­4 6 -­seconds-­in-­george-­floyd-­tribute-­today/. Of course, much of the “solidarity” was

266 : Notes to Pages 216 – 22 0

for the sake of cameras and publicity. For example, two police officers who were praised for doing the electric slide with protesters during a BLM march were soon after arrested for participating in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, which was organized and carried out by white nationalists. See Bernard Beane Smalls, “Officers Who Did the Electric Slide at BLM Rally Also Stormed the Capitol during Saltine-­Fueled Insurrection,” Hip Hop Wired, March 9, 2021, https://hiphopwired .com/959385/virgina-­cops-­black-­lives-­matter-­capitol-­riots/. 17. Nubras Samayeen, Adrian Wong, and Cameron McCarthy, “Space to Breathe: George Floyd, BLM Plaza and the Monumentalization of Divided American Urban Landscapes,” Education Philosophy & Theory, July 23, 2020. 18. Leah Asmelash, “Washington’s New Black Lives Matter Mural Is Captured in Satellite Image,” CNN, June 6, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/06/us/black -­lives-­matter-­dc-­street-­mural-­space-­trnd/index.html. 19. “BLM DC Response to Bowser Mural,” BLM DC, June 6, 2020, https://docs .google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-­1vR-­ze92sL58lYjwT8Dm2oSKjh0pGMsBWvki u0Z7zRrEVoRCSfQhhGB6F3N1EiTpE3dEUD76UJM_I03X/pub. 20. Samayeen, Wong, and McCarthy, “Space to Breathe.” 21. Rachel Sadon, Hannah Schuster, and Matt Blitz. “Activists Painted ‘Defund the Police’ Next to the New Black Lives Matter Mural,” NPR, June 8, 2020, https:// www.npr.org/local/305/2020/06/08/872234932/activists-­painted- ­defund-­the-­po lice-­next-­to-­the-­new-­black-­lives-­matter-­mural. 22. Haroon Siddique, “Despite PM’s Praise of Nurses, It’s Tory Policies That Made Them Suffer,” The Guardian, April 13, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com /society/2020/apr/13/despite-­pms-­praise- ­of-­nurses-­its-­tory-­policies-­that-­made -­them-­suffer. 23. Billock, “How Street Artists around the World Are Reacting to COVID-­19.” 24. Roger MacGinty and Oliver Richmond, “The Local Turn in Peace Building: A Critical Agenda for Peace,” Third World Quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013): 763–83. 25. See Birte Vogel, Catherine Arthur, Eric Lepp, Dylan O’Driscoll, and Billy Tusker Haworth, “Reading Socio-­Political and Spatial Dynamics through Graffiti in Conflict-­Affected Societies,” Third World Quarterly 41 (2020): 1–21. Vogel is also the co-­investigator of the AHRC-­funded project The Art of Peace: Interrogating Community Devised Arts Based Peacebuilding that examines the role of graffiti in conflict areas. 26. Lutz Heinke, “Why We Painted Over Berlin’s Most Famous Graffiti,” The Guard‑ ian, December 19, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec /19/why-­we-­painted-­over-­berlin-­graffiti-­kreuzberg-­murals.

Index

Abaza, Mona, 38, 64 Abulhawa, Dani, 34 Abushagur, Soumiea, 48 Acconci, Vito, 43–45 Adams, Vincanne, 136 After the Flood (Polidori), 148–51, 209 Ahmed, Noha, 92 Alderman, Derek, 137, 146, 151, 167 Ali, Amr, 67 Ali, Naji al-, 54. See also Handala Aly, Mahmoud, 66 Amin, Ash, 34, 35 Amin, Heba, 1, 2, 5 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 115 April 6 Youth Movement, 67 art wash, 20 Ashekman, 85 Ashuri, Tamar, 56 Assad, Bashar al-, 1 Austin, Joe, 96 Awad, Ala, 69, 96 Babic, Iliana, 36 Badr Team, 1, 62 Balfour Declaration, 110–11, 129 Ball, Ana, 115 Baker, Ralph, 49 Bakr, Ammar Abo, 18, 39, 67, 69, 89, 90, 91, 93, 96

Banksy, 20, 80, 90, 99–101, 155, 171; ambiguous politics, 104, 125–27; “Banksy effect,” 123, 219; Dismaland, 128; Gaza murals, 125–27; life and performances, 102–5; Palestinian criticism of, 105–6, 117–18, 129–30; Santa’s Ghetto, 103, 104, 127, 128; Walled Off Hotel, 127–29; West Bank murals, 105–9, 114–17 Barnes, Rahmaan Statik, 199 Baudrillard, Jean, 66 Bayat, Asef, 37 Benjamin, Walter, 28, 38–39, 100 Berwick, Phil, 16–17 Bhattacharyya, Gargi, 117 Black Lives Matter, 2, 9, 11, 17, 22, 207, 214–17 Black Panther Party, 154 Blanco, Kathleen Babineaux, 135, 140 Bloch, Stefano, 5 Bmike. See Odums, Brandan (Bmike) Borden, Ian, 34 border walls, 7, 19, 20, 25, 38, 56, 110– 12; as performance of security, 26– 29, 100–101, 108–9. See also Separation Wall; US-Mexican border wall; walls Borrando la frontera, 114–15. See also Fernández, Ana Teresa

268 : In dex

Bourdieu, Pierre, 7 Bourgois, Philippe, 7 Bridges, Ruby, 133–34, 152, 159 broken windows, vii Brown, H. Rap ( Jamil Abdullah AlAmin), 201, 207 Brown, Michael, 8–17, 202, 214. See also Ferguson, Missouri Bruno, David, 65 Burton, John, 5 calligraphy, 85, 86. See also eL Seed; Halwani, Yazan Cantú, Norma E., 115 Carmody, David, 172, 185 Chemis, 201 Chin, Vincent, 170, 186–87, 189 Chmielewska, Ella, 65, 69 civil uprising, 8–15, 38, 169–70, 190 Clark, Emily, 142 Collins, John, 116 Coontz, Stephanie, 134 Cornbread, 176 COVID-19, 209–11, 218, 220. See also under graffiti Crawford, Edward, Jr., 9 Cresswell, Tim, 34, 37 Cummings, Sean, 157–58, 160–62, 165, 171, 203 Dada, 11, 62 Davis, Angela, 14 Davis, Jefferson, 49 Debord, Guy, 37, 38 Defund the Police, 215, 217 Derrida, Jacques, 34 Desmazes, Philippe, 46 Destroy This Memory (Misrach), 149– 51 Detroit, 7, 20–21, 178–80; downtown [Gilbertville], 21, 180. See also Eastern Market; Grand River Avenue; Heidelberg Street/Project Detropia (documentary), 169

Di Lauro, Marco, 107 Dicus, Erma, 193 disaster tourism, 128, 193–96 Do The Right Thing (film), 14 Donkey Documents (Banksy), 105–6. See also Banksy Dovey, Kim, 63, 74, 93 Eastern Market, 172–73, 181, 185, 187, 188, 200. See also Detroit Egan, Courtney, 151 eL Seed, 86–88, 89, 96 El Teneen, 77 Elkashef, Aida, 77 Ellis, Herby, 50 Exhibit Be, 156–58, 161. See also Odums, Brandan (Bmike) Eytan, Ted, 216 Fairey, Shepard (Obey), 182–84 Fairuz, 86 Fein, Skylar, 147–48, 155, 162–65 Ferguson, Missouri, 8–17, 202 Fernández, Ana Teresa, 20, 114–15, 120 Florida Projects, 153–55. See also Odums, Brandan (Bmike) Floyd, George, 22, 214 Flying Balloon Girl (Banksy), 99–101, 106; See also Banksy Forty, Adrian, 30, 35 Freedom Painters, 92–93 Gaddafi, Muammar, 46–48 Gaia, 186–87, 188 Gambill, Deborah, 15–17 Ganzeer, 51–52, 69, 70–72, 75–80, 81–82, 88, 93, 95. See also Tank vs Bread-Biker Garner, Eric, 11 Gastman, Rodger, 175 General Nelson M. Walker (ship), 49–51, 53 gentrification, 18, 177–78, 196, 219, 220;

In dex : 269

anti-gentrification graffiti, 162–63, 203–5; of Baton Rouge, 197–208; of Detroit, 20, 169–74, 180–82, 184–90, 193; of New Orleans, 158–67, 193 Ghawas, Khadiga El-, 69 Gilbert, Dan, 173, 179–82, 184, 192, 196, 203 Gilo settlement mural, 112–13 Giuliani, Rudy, vii Goldman, Jane, 176 Gould, Rebecca, 113 graffiti: antiausterity, 212–14; antipolice, 8, 9, 13–15, 83, 202, 203, 215, 217; as assemblage, 3, 4, 19, 63, 69, 74, 97; Bronx graffiti, 17; Civil War graffiti, 49; COVID-19 graffiti, 21, 211–13, 217, 220–21; definition of, 5; detention of writers, 67, 82–83, 88, 93; erasure, vii, ix, 15, 48, 63, 67, 88– 91, 93, 96, 134, 163, 176–77, 241, 243; Intifada graffiti, 18, 20, 121–24; as political desire, 3, 15, 20, 30, 34, 41, 45, 48, 58, 64–65, 69, 72, 74, 80, 91, 96, 122–23; pope graffiti, 131–32; as representation of chaos, 2, 9, 142– 45, 147–49, 151; subway graffiti, 5, 220–21; vulgarity, 33, 149–51; war graffiti, 18, 46–51; as waves, 17–18, 66, 83, 142–45; as weapons, 6, 7, 75–79. See also pixação graffiti tourists, 100, 105, 108, 116, 123, 219 graffiti war, vii, 5, 184–90 Grand River Avenue, 21, 184–90, 192. See also Detroit Green Revolution, 17 Guevara, Che, 3, 55 Guyton, Tyree, 190–96. See also Heidelberg Street/Project Habermas, Jürgen, 19, 40–45, 84 Halwani, Yazan, 84–86, 87, 88, 96. See also calligraphy Hamalawy, Hossam el-, 72, 73

Hamdy, Basma, 79 Hanauer, David, 115 Handala, 54–60. See also Ali, Naji alHaraway, Donna, 109 Harris, Kevin, 197–205, 206, 207. See also Museum of Public Art Harsh, 147, 163, 164, 211. See also Top Mob Harvey, David, 39 Hauser, Zvi, 49 Heidelberg Street/Project, 21, 190–96 Henke, Lutz, 174 Herron, Jerry, 170, 191, 192 Hershberger, Patrick, 187 Hill, Helen, 151 Hocking, Scott, 257 Homeland (television show), 1–2, 3, 5 Honoré, Russel, 141 Hope, Bradley, 90 Hurricane Katrina, 6, 20, 135–38, 152, 219 Hussein, Saddam, 35–36 Ibrahim, Samaan, 87 Ice Cube, 14 Iriani, Mathar al-, 120 Israeli-Palestinian relationship, 24, 54, 58, 100–102, 105, 121–24 Jackmon, Marvin (Marvin X), 14 Jacobs, Jane, 38 Jad, Islah, 117 James, Sydney, 185 Jarbou, Rana, 67 Kabacoff, Pres, 165 Kapp, Carmen, 1, 2, 5 Karl, Don, 1, 2, 5, 79 Kelley, Robin, 14 Khaled, Ali, 62, 74 Khaled, Hany, 69, 81, 96 Khaled, Leila, 58 Khalil, As’ad Abu, 76 Kilroy, 51–54, 59–60

270 : In dex

Koch, Ed, vii Kraidy, Marwan, 83–84 Krastev, Ivan, 45, 84 Kratsman, Miki, 58, 248 Krippendorff, David, 5 Kristeva, Julia, 191 Lam, Kelly, 130 Lancione, Michele, 210 Lee, Spike, 14, 140, 144 Lefebvre, Henri, 37, 39 Let’s Heal STL (Gambill and Montgom­ ery), 15–17 Levine, Michael, 149–51 Limbaugh, Rush, 139–40 Loos, Adolf, 33–34, 39 Louis, Édouard, 104 MacCash, Doug, 147, 155 mad graffiti week/weekend, 77–79. See also Ganzeer Maher, Ahmed, 67 Malul-Zadka, Ruth, 113 Mask of Freedom, 77. See also Ganzeer MC Ren, 14 Mersal, Iman, 68, 72 Miles, Douglas, 153 Misrach, Richard, 148–51 Miss 17, 171 Mitchel, W. J. T., 113 Mohamed Mahmoud Street, 18, 33, 39, 88–91. See also Bakr, Ammar Abo; No Walls campaign; Tahrir Square Montgomery, Ronald, 15–17 Moore, Alan, 70 Morayef, Soraya, 40, 80, 88, 89, 94 Mouffe, Chantal, 19, 40–45 Moza, 95 Mubarak, Hosni, 3, 20, 61, 62, 64, 90, 93; anti-Mubarak graffiti, 65, 70, 71– 72, 76, 80, 82, 93 Museum of Public Art, 197–204, 206. See also Harris, Kevin Muslim Brotherhood, 3, 64

Nada, Mohamed, 67 Nadim, Ahmed, 77 Nagi, Ahmed, 66 Nagin, Ray, 165 Najjar, Orayb Aref, 55 neoliberalism, 7, 26, 41, 93, 136–37, 138, 156, 165, 175–77, 192, 219 New Orleans, 7, 20, 135, 161–67; as coffee table book, 148–51; as exceptional, 137, 140, 141–42; post-Katrina graffiti, 20, 43, 137, 142–45, 146–51, 163, 209, 211; racialized framing of, 139–40, 142; as war zone, 141 Niebrzydowski, Courtney, 106 Nixon, Robert, 136, 139 No Fly Zone, 188–89 No Walls campaign, 88–91, 106. See also Bakr, Ammar Abo; Mohamed Mahmoud Street; Tahrir Square Northern Ireland, 11 N.W.A., 9 Obama, Barack, 8, 27 O’Brien, Tim, 51 Odums, B. B., 193, 196 Odums, Brandan (Bmike), 152–60, 161, 164 Olsen, Scott, 14 Oxist, 77 Pabón-Colón, Jessica Nydia, 218, 247, 258 Palestine: Aida Refugee Camp, 23, 24, 111–12; erasure of, 20, 100–101, 106, 108, 109–11, 113, 116–17, 124; international relations, 11, 55–56, 116, 128; Intifada graffiti, 18, 20, 121–24. See also Israeli-Palestinian relationship; Separation Wall peace and conflict studies, 6 Peck, Jamie, 177 Perception (eL Seed), 86–88. See also eL Seed Perec, Georges, 23, 24, 37

In dex : 271

Peteet, Julie, 110, 121–23 Petrucci, Nello, 212 Pham, Tara, 10 Philadelphia, 176–77, 200 Phillips, Casey, 205–8 Phillips, David, 145 Phillips, Susan, 5 Piano, Doreen, 137, 253 Pinchevski, Amit, 56 pixação, 174–76. See also graffiti; São Paulo Polidori, Robert, 148–51 Port Said massacre, 88–89 Problem We All Live With, The (Rockwell), 133–35, 152 Project Be, 155, 156. See also Odums, Brandan (Bmike) Public Enemy, 14 public sphere, 4, 40–46. See also Acconci, Vito; Habermas, Jürgen; Mouffe, Chantal Rabin, Yitzhak, 25 racial capitalism, viii, 4, 137. See also gentrification Ramadan, Ayman, 82–83, 88 Rashidi, Yasmine El, 68, 82 Rawabet Theater, 87 Raz, Renen, 124 Reeves, Caroline, 140 Revok, 187–88, 189 Rice Mill Lofts, 160, 161, 165. See also Cummings, Sean Right to Wynwood (documentary), 177– 78 Risk, Hisham, 67 Rivera, Diego, 177, 186 Rockwell, Norman, 133–35, 152 Rubio, Luis, 52 Sad Panda, 61, 94–97 Said, Edward, 29, 110 São Paulo, 174–76, 200 Sassen, Saskia, 63, 68, 90, 97

Schacter, Raphael, 33, 177–78, 211, 218 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 7 Schwartz, Ray, 175 Scott, James C., 123 Separation Wall, viii, 7, 20, 24–25, 56– 58, 90, 99, 128; Banksy murals, 99– 100, 105–8, 124, 219; US-Israeli partnership, 115. See also border walls Sharif, Kadhem, 35 Sharon, Ariel, 110, 113 Sheikh, Simon, 41 Shihadeh, Mira, 42, 69 Shimi, Rowan El, 74 Simone, AbdouMaliq, 210 Sintex, 185–90 Situationists, 33, 37–38 slow violence, 136, 139. See also gentrification Soja, Edward, 38 Sorel, George, 8 Sterling, Alton, 202, 206 streets, 37–40, 63, 68, 91. See also Acconci, Vito; Habermas, Jürgen; Mouffe, Chantal; public sphere Studio Be, 158. See also Odums, Brandan (Bmike) Subay, Murad, 20, 118–21 Suleiman, Omar, 3 Supreme Council of the Military Forces (SCAF), 61, 62, 89, 90; anti-SCAF graffiti, 77, 78, 82, 89, 93. See also Mask of Freedom Tahrir Square, viii, 18, 42–43, 62, 64– 65, 88, 93, 219; occupation of, 3, 39, 63, 68, 72–74. See also Bakr, Ammar Abo; Mohamed Mahmoud Street; No Walls campaign Tank vs Bread-Biker, 61–62, 69, 76, 95, 96. See also Ganzeer Tarek, Aya, 69, 95 This Is Not Graffiti, 94. See also Morayef, Soraya Thomas, Lynnell, 138, 141

272 : In dex

Thrift, Nigel, 34, 35 Tiburi, Marcia, 175 Tlaib, Rashida, 179 Trigg, Dylan, 34, 35 Tulke, Julia, 213, 217, 218 Top Mob, 146–49. See also Harsh Trump, Donald, 25–28, 56, 201, 214, 216 US-Mexican border wall, 25–29, 114–15, 120. See also border walls; Fernández, Ana Teresa Vaneigem, Raoul, 37, 38 Vertov, Dziga, 31–32 violence, vii, 4, 6–9, 17–18, 50, 56–60, 71, 89, 136, 201; graffiti as violence, 6, 7–8, 51, 78–79, 89, 173, 213 Wagdy, Lillian, 92 Wall of Shame (Lebanon), 84 walls, 23–25, 36, 127–29; concrete, 30– 36, 111; wall cut art, 36–37. See also border walls; Separation Wall

Walls Project (Baton Rouge), 205–8 Walls Remember Their Faces, The (Subay), 119–21. See also Subay, Murad Ward, Heather, 137, 146 Weaver, Derek, 184–90, 192, 193, 196 Wheeler, Heaster, 180 Whitfield, Jenenne, 194–95 Williams, Helena, 206 Wilson, Meredith, 65 Wolfe, Patrick, 110, 113 Wollan, Simon, 63, 74, 93 Woodcock, Ian, 63, 74, 93 Wynwood, Miami, 177–78. See also gentrification Yemen war, 118 Yiftachel, Oren, 111 “you stink” protests, 83–84, 85, 214 Young, Kevin, 21 Z garage, 182. See also Gilbert, Dan Zeft, 42 Zionism, 25, 109–14, 121